Desperate Measures: A Mystery (26 page)

“Yes.” She said nothing more, waited.

“And then,” Ash said slowly, “as soon as she was free to, she’d have called me, and I’d have got her and the boys to safety before going after Graves with a chain saw.”

Which was where the defense of duress fell down, and both of them knew it. If the woman really had been living pleasantly in Cambridge, what could have stopped her from contacting Ash or Ash’s office or the police for four years?

“She’d have done anything to protect the boys.” Even in his own ears it sounded like an excuse. But it was true. Presented with a straight choice between their well-being and his, Ash knew Cathy would have chosen her sons. It’s what mothers do. She would fight like a tigress to protect them all, but if she couldn’t, the children would come first.

“Yes,” Hazel said again.

His head came up pugnaciously. In the half-light she couldn’t see his face, only the burning of his eyes. “You’re determined to think the worst of her!”

“Gabriel, I’m not!” But she bridled her tongue. In his pain he was striking out at the nearest target; it was a miracle that he wasn’t doing it physically. “Truly. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s me saying this stuff. I’ll be sorry if I’m wrong, and even more sorry if I’m right. But believing what I do, I had to tell you. You think this is a figment of my imagination? If you can look at the facts honestly and come to another conclusion, no one will be more relieved than me.”

Ash sucked in one deep breath after another, like someone preparing for a dive. “All right, tell me. All these
facts
you’ve discovered.” He managed to make it sound like the kind of
f
word usually represented by a row of stars. “Tell me what gives you the right to say these things about my wife.”

Hazel was deeply impressed that he was managing to remain logical. It didn’t have to matter that he was talking as if he hated her. This was more important than the feelings of either of them. People had died. At least, people had disappeared, and it was too much to hope that the crews of several aircraft were
all
living under assumed names in Cambridge.

She kept her manner cool, forensic. “The hair samples show that the boys were in England, probably close to Cambridge, most of the time they were supposed to be in Somalia. Graves told us he was keeping an eye on the Cambridge flat for a woman who was working abroad. But the porters told me she was there for three and a half years, until sometime in June.”

“So?”

“It was mid-June when you interviewed Graves on our way down to visit my father. At the time you thought he was just one of the manufacturers who’d lost arms shipments. But if he is in cahoots with the pirates, you turning up again must have alarmed the hell out of him. He’d thought you were an ex-problem. But you were back in business and you’d got as far as his door. He had to do two things as a matter of urgency. One was to shut you up for good, hence the ambush on our way back from the horse fair. The other was to warn his co-conspirators.”

“Cathy is
not
a co-conspirator!”

There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Hazel pressed on. “At which point, Miss Anderson suddenly left her flat in Cambridge, without telling the porters where she was going or how long she’d be away. But she never meant to return. All their personal belongings were removed—hers and the children’s. All she left behind were the furniture and that computer, set up to handle video calls.”

That hit Ash like a fist. “Children?” he said faintly.

Hazel nodded. Again she waited.

Eventually he whispered, “Boys? Girls?”

“Two boys. Gabriel, they were your sons. It’s straining credulity to think anything else. When she learned you were back on the job, she packed up and left. I presume she went to Africa then. To be safe if you couldn’t be stopped, to be brought back if you could.” She didn’t spell it out—“if they succeeded in accomplishing your death”—but Ash knew what she meant.

“Graves set up the video call,” Hazel went on. “All they needed was a bare room somewhere and enough know-how to reroute the transmissions. We thought we were following Graves to Cambridge, but actually he was leading us. He wanted to show you that your family were still alive but also still in danger. And we fell for it like a couple of amateurs,” she added bitterly. “I thought it was as real as you did.”

“Then…” A ghost of a voice in the half darkness. “Their offer. My family’s lives for mine. If you’re right … Cathy wanted me dead as much as Graves did.”

Hazel winced. It had been necessary to convince him. It seemed she’d succeeded. She wished she could feel happier about it. “She may have thought she was in too deep to object to anything he proposed.” It wasn’t much of an argument, but it was all she could manage to smooth a little balm on Ash’s excoriated soul.

He shook his head, almost in wonder. “There was only one way she could come home—if I wasn’t there waiting for her. If she’d come back to me, sooner or later one of the boys would have said something that blew her story apart. She could drill them in what they could and couldn’t say, and protect them from interrogation, but she couldn’t keep them from talking to their father. Sooner or later, one of those little boys was going to say something that proved his mother a liar.”

Hazel had nothing to say that would make this any easier for him, and saw no need to pile more evidence on what he had already accepted. Maybe tomorrow she’d tell him that she’d shown the Cambridge porters the photographs she’d taken of Ash’s sons, and they’d recognized them immediately.

He gave it one last try. “Could he have … compelled her? Threatened her? Threatened the boys?”

“It’s possible.”

But Ash had never seen any point in fooling himself. “If she’d needed help dealing with him, it was all around her. As close as the nearest police station. She lived in Cambridge for three and a half years? If she’d felt threatened by Graves, she’d have done something about it.”

“You realize,” Hazel said after a decent pause, “I have to go to the police with this.”

He hesitated, but not for long. “Yes.”

“And it’ll be out of our hands what happens next.”

Still buffeted by the inner turmoil, Ash was slow to realize that what had sounded like a statement was in fact a question. “I suppose so.…”

Hazel sighed. If they’d been discussing anyone’s situation other than his own, he’d have realized at once that, while there could be no question about what she had to do with her information, there might be some flexibility as to when she had to do it. But he was too shocked, too deeply hurt. He needed her to guide him through the maze of what was possible.

She said patiently, “If you wanted to, you could talk to her first. I can hold off for a few hours, if you want to see her before she’s arrested.”

He tried to think about it rationally. “I said I’d stay away from her. I promised.”

But the situation had changed since that promise was made, and Hazel knew things that Philip Welbeck didn’t. “I’m not saying it’s a good idea. Just that, if you want to, this will be the last chance.”

Even then Ash didn’t realize what it was she wasn’t saying. That if, in spite of everything, he’d sooner see his wife disappear than face prison, this would be his last opportunity to help her. Once Hazel had talked to DI Gorman, no one would care what either she or Ash wanted. Cathy would be arrested, tried, and convicted for her part in a murderous conspiracy. She would be an old woman before she was free.

But there was a limit to what Hazel was prepared to do, even for her friend, and telling him how to subvert the course of justice was beyond it.

“I suppose,” Ash said slowly, “I could give her the chance to explain.”

That’s one explanation that’d be worth hearing, thought Hazel.

He made his mind up. “I’ll go around there now, while the boys are asleep. They don’t need to hear the things I’m going to need to say.”

But of course, that wouldn’t work, either. “They’re not at Highfield Road, Gabriel. They went up to Chester a week ago, to see her mother.”

Almost more than anything Hazel had said, that seemed finally to put the thing beyond doubt. To a man desperate to believe in his wife, everything else could have been the result of threats, misunderstandings, poor judgment. But that was a lie, and there was only one reason Cathy Ash might lie to Hazel Best. So far as Cathy could know, no one harbored any suspicions about her involvement, so it wasn’t her own whereabouts she was anxious to keep secret.

Ash’s voice came out dead flat. “Her mother’s been dead for years.”

Hazel had thought she knew everything that mattered. She was startled to find she didn’t. “Then we’ve no idea where she went when she left Norbold.”

Ash sucked in a long, slow breath, considering. Looking for alternatives. Finding none. “Of course we have,” he said at last. “She’s gone to him. To Graves. She’s taken my sons and gone to meet the man she betrayed me for.”

CHAPTER 29

F
IRST THING IN THE MORNING,
Hazel talked to DI Gorman. She couldn’t be sure if he accepted her theory as gospel, but before she’d even finished he was on the phone to Philip Welbeck in the quieter part of Whitehall. Soon after that Welbeck called Laura Fry, and Laura went up to her attic to tell Ash he was a free man.

But he wasn’t there.

*   *   *

Dave Gorman was famously even-tempered, for a detective inspector. He wasn’t exactly an intellectual—he still played rugby when he could, and he had the lowest hairline of anyone Hazel had ever seen not eating a banana—but he wasn’t a bully. He didn’t believe that suspects confessed sooner or constables worked better for being shouted at, and he was better at listening, and at thinking about what he’d heard, than many of his rank.

So the sound of his voice coming through two closed doors and down the stairwell raised eyebrows at the coffee machine in the ground-floor corridor. Then someone mouthed the words
Hazel Best
, and everyone else nodded their understanding.

“For an intelligent woman,” Gorman thundered, “you do a damn good impression of a bimbo sometimes!”

Hazel winced. But she hardly felt able to argue. Once again, despite her good intentions, she’d made misjudgments you wouldn’t expect from someone on their first week out of police college, allowing a situation to develop that would have been prevented by one phone call to the right person at the right time. She might have thought she was helping her friend, but in reality she’d created an opportunity for a distressed and vulnerable man to cut himself off from all sources of help and go alone in pursuit of two dangerous people.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “It was stupid. I didn’t expect…”

“
What
didn’t you expect?” demanded Gorman. “That Ash would be angry enough to do something crazy?
Why
wouldn’t you expect that? The man’s unhinged at the best of times! Did you think he’d behave
more
rationally when you told him his wife had only been pretending for the four years he’d thought she was dead?”

“Of course not.” She didn’t dare raise her eyes yet. “I just didn’t expect him to do anything about it. I didn’t think there was anything he
could
do. He said he didn’t know where she’d gone.”

“And you believed him?”

“Yes! He was upset and hurt, and if Cathy had still been at Highfield Road, I’d have—I don’t know—sat on his head till he calmed down. But she wasn’t. She’d taken the boys and gone away, and she’d lied about where she’d gone to. And yes, I believed Gabriel when he said he didn’t know where she would go, except that she’d probably gone to Graves.” She risked a covert glance at the DI. “Well, CTC have been looking for him for a week and not found him. Why would Gabriel Ash know where to look?”

“You think he’s just wandering about on spec, hoping to get lucky? Posting pictures in post office windows like his wife was a lost cat?”

Hazel shook her head. “I’m guessing that after I left him, he sat up the rest of the night thinking about it, and finally he thought of something worth checking out. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was right,” she added hopefully. “If he checks it out and it was wrong, he’ll come home.”

“And if he checks it out and it was right,” snarled Gorman, “he’s going toe-to-toe with a man who gets people killed. You’d better hope Ash is on a wild-goose chase. If he isn’t, the next time you’ll see him is on a slab.”

*   *   *

Gabriel Ash drove north in his mother’s car. Hazel had made him tax and insure it and send it for a service after they got back from Byrfield. He suspected she was making the point that if she’d wanted to be a taxi driver, she wouldn’t have joined the police. At the time he’d thought it a waste of money: a man who’d hardly left his house for four years didn’t need a car. Now he was glad she’d insisted. The more reputable hire firms object to dealing with dead men, and if he’d tried to steal one, doubtless he’d have been caught. He had no talent for lawbreaking.

Fortunately, the senior Mrs. Ash had believed in putting her money into things that would last. So while the Volvo was of pensionable age, the freshly tuned engine was as keen as a retired racehorse gone hunting. Ash got onto the motorway, followed the arrows for the North—it would be hours before the signs got more specific—and let the old girl have her head.

Even this early in the morning the motorway wasn’t empty. It was never empty. But it was much quieter than it would have been if he’d agonized just an hour longer about what he should do, and he slipped into a comfortable gap between a soft furnisher’s panel van and a big refrigerated trailer, and let them bear him along like surfing a tarmac wave. Decision making cut to a minimum, he was free to consider the situation in which he found himself: the things he had to do, the things he had already done.

Of the latter, he felt worst about the way he’d treated Hazel. He hadn’t been lying when he said he didn’t know where Cathy had gone; knowing had come later, stealing up by degrees along with the daylight as he sat alone in the attic room overlooking the park, hunched over, hugging himself like someone in pain. But he could have called her. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her where he was going, but he could at least have told her not to worry, that he knew what he was doing. Although that
would
have been a lie.