Perfect Sins (29 page)

“You know what it's about,” growled Ash. “I told you—no one else, just you—that I was taking up the case again, and five days later someone fired a gun at me!”

“Mr. Ash,” said Hazel sharply, “remember what you were told. You're allowed to be here for one reason only, and this isn't it. We will get to the truth, and we'll do it sooner rather than later. But it's my job to ask the questions, not yours.”

From the look he gave her, Ash was almost as taken aback as Graves was. Except that he knew she was making this up as she went along, and Graves didn't seem to suspect it. At least not yet.

“So, Mr. Graves,” she went on, “are you going to cooperate with our investigation? We know you're involved. You can deny it till you're blue in the face, but we know it and we can prove it. Is that what you want—for us to prove it in court? Remembering that people have died as a result of this piracy? You probably shouldn't count on getting a sympathetic jury.

“But it's your call. You
can
phone your solicitor”—it was all she could do not to call him “your mouthpiece”: those damned films again!—“and we'll take this down the police station, and from then on everything's official and by the book. Or we can use this window of opportunity to see if there's some other way of proceeding. If you were a victim of these events, like Mr. Ash and his family, now is the time to say so. If you're acting under duress, if the pirates have a hold over you that's prevented you from being open and honest with us until now, this is when you tell us. Later will be too late.”

In the tense silence that followed, with Graves staring at her in shock and horror and Ash with a kind of startled admiration, Hazel tried to remember exactly what she'd said. Had she lied? Had she said anything that would compromise a prosecution when this was handed over to real CID officers? She hoped not. She thought all the actual words were true, even if the impression she'd been trying to create with them was a fiction.

And in one way it mattered less than it might otherwise have done. Getting Graves into court, getting convictions against him or anyone, was a secondary consideration. The main purpose of this—of all of it: of today's drive, of everything Ash had done since he got his face out of the dirt where events had ground it—was to find out what had happened to Cathy Ash and her sons. Making someone amenable would be a bonus; the prime purpose was to learn the facts. If Stephen Graves knew them, or knew someone who did, and could be induced to talk, it mattered more that he told the truth than that they could make charges against him stick. Ash needed to hear the truth. What he did in consequence—if he did anything, if there was anything to do—was tomorrow's problem.

So she held Graves's stricken eyes, and she didn't blink, and she let her own gaze harden and narrow until it must have felt like a drill boring into his forehead. “Well?” she said impatiently. “Have you anything to tell us? Or do we start making phone calls?”

Still the man couldn't bring himself to decide. Hazel sighed, reached for her phone. “All right, then. Just don't say you never got a break.…”

It was the final straw that broke his resolve. Stephen Graves had no way of knowing if it would be better to confide in this young policewoman and hope she'd be able to help him, or say nothing and hope there was a gap between what the police knew and what they could prove that he could vanish through. But she was here, and Ash was here, and that meant it wasn't all smoke and mirrors. They'd tied him to this thing. Doing nothing—holding tight and hoping—was no longer an option.

“All right!” he said rapidly. “All right. I'll tell you what I know. But you have to understand, I'm not part of it. Not from choice, and not for money. I was told what I had to do, and that if I didn't do it, or if I talked about it afterward, someone would die.” He looked beseechingly at Ash. “I know you know how that feels.”

 

CHAPTER 29

W
HATEVER
H
AZEL WAS
expecting, it wasn't that. “A hostage?” She heard her voice soar. “The pirates took someone of yours hostage, too?”

Ash was beyond pale. His skin was gray. But he was fighting to hold himself together, this close to answers he'd been seeking through four long, hard years. Hazel could hear the clamped-down tension in his voice, but the questions he was asking were the right questions. “Someone off one of your transports?”

Graves shook his head. “No. Someone I didn't even know until … It's hard to explain. Look, can I tell you what happened? How it happened? Then you'll understand. I'm not trying to get out of anything. I don't know—I honest to God don't know—where I stand legally. Duress? Yes, certainly. They said they'd kill her if I didn't keep my mouth shut.

“She's just some woman. I didn't even know her before this started. But they were clever, you see. They let her talk to me. They let us talk over a period of months, and you build up a kind of relationship. And it was as if this was the one person I could do something to save. All the others, including the men flying my shipments, were gone and couldn't be helped. But this one woman was alive, and would stay alive if I cooperated, and would die if I didn't. Somehow that mattered more than everything else.

“You're going to tell me,” he said, anticipating Hazel's interjection with perfect accuracy, “that I could have saved a lot more people by going to the police with the information I had. And maybe you're right. I'm not sure—I only know what they allowed me to know, I couldn't tell anyone where they are or how to find them—but maybe I could have prevented some of the later hijackings. And I know: people died every time. People working for me, some of them. And I can't tell you how sorry I am—for them, for their families, for my colleagues in this industry who thought those deaths were their responsibility, when in fact they were mine.

“I could have stopped that. I could have blown the whistle, and trusted to the police to protect me and mine. I
should
have done that. But they'd have killed her. This one woman, who begged me to help her, who I'd managed to keep alive this far.”

He took a deep breath, the first he'd managed since deciding to talk. Then he went on in a slightly more measured fashion. “I tried to do it. I kept trying. I picked up the phone more times than I can tell you. Sometimes I even got as far as dialing. I almost told you, Gabriel, when you came to see me—last week, and then again today. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and also the hardest. I knew—I've always known—it was the right thing to do. But you see, I knew her by now. She trusted me. I couldn't betray her. It was easier to condemn a lot of people I'd never met than this one woman, sitting in a locked room somewhere in Somalia, guns pointed at her head, struggling to survive every day in the hope of a rescue that never came. I couldn't bring myself to buy other people's lives with hers.”

“What did you do instead?” Hazel asked softly, afraid that even at this late stage he could be jolted back into silence. “Give them advance warning of your shipments that were heading into their part of the world? Tell them when you heard about other people's shipments?”

Graves hung his head. “Yes. That's exactly what I did. Payloads, routes, destinations, refueling stops. The level of onboard security. It wasn't worth their while to take on heavily guarded shipments—but nobody can afford that level of security all the time. When there's been no trouble for a while, the security is scaled back. That's what I told them—when it was safe to take on a particular plane and when it wasn't.”

“But surely to God,” exclaimed Hazel, “
nobody
refuels in Somalia! Nobody's that much of an optimist.”

Graves shook his head. “Of course not. But the world hasn't just got smaller for you and me—it's got smaller for the Somali pirates as well. In small, fast surface craft they'll board oceangoing ships three hundred miles offshore. But they have aircraft as well—planes and helicopters. With those, all central Africa is within their reach.”

“Then why not overfly central Africa?”

“We try to. The problem is, a plane capable of carrying that much fuel is prohibitively expensive to operate. Our customers resist spending that kind of money. And then, what do you do if your end user is in the danger zone? You take all the precautions you can, you remind yourself that most flights get through without any trouble, and you go for it. Usually you're lucky. Sometimes you're not.”

“It isn't luck,” growled Ash, “when someone is passing your flight plans to the enemy.”

“No,” whispered Graves. The weight of his culpability had bowed him. He looked up hesitantly. “What will you do?”

“What do you
think
we're going to do?” demanded Hazel. “The first thing we're going to do is tell everyone involved in this industry to put on hold any plans they've mentioned in your hearing. Then we're going to have you talk to experts in this field with a view to getting as much information as possible about where these pirates are located and how they can be stopped.”

“And the woman?”

Hazel hardened her heart. “It'll be someone else's decision, but I don't think we can afford to prioritize her safety. Not with aircrew going missing every few months. In order to protect her, you've sacrificed innocent people. That can't go on. I'm sorry for her, desperately sorry. But it's too high a price to pay for one woman's life.”

“Who is she?”

Hazel didn't have to look at him; she could tell from the timbre of Ash's voice what he was thinking. “Gabriel—don't.”

“I know,” he said quickly. There was an urgent rasp in the words. “I know all about odds. I know what the odds are against its being Cathy. But the thing about odds is, even at a thousand to one, there is that one. Even at fourteen million to one,
somebody
wins the lottery.” A fragile smile flickered across his face. “It could be me.”

Hazel shrugged. He needed to know. Even though knowing would tear him up all over again. She said to Graves, “You heard the man. Who is she, this woman whose life is worth dozens of other people's?”

Grave shook his head apologetically. “I don't know. They've never told me her name. They must have told her not to tell me. They call her…” He glanced furtively between them and swallowed. “They call her the cash cow.”

Cold fury bubbled up behind Hazel's breastbone. She mightn't be Gabriel Ash's wife, this nameless woman sitting in a locked room in Mogadishu, but she was someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's daughter. And the men who had snatched her from that life—hauled her off a yacht, or a tourist beach, or a safari coach, waved their guns in her face, put her in immediate and ongoing fear of death—had the temerity to insult her as well. The cash cow. She kept them safe, and she kept the trade on which their piracy depended flowing, and they called her that.

Hazel had never wanted to kill anyone before, not even the man she
had
killed. She'd done what was necessary to keep other, better people alive, but she hadn't wanted to end his life the way she wanted to end theirs. The pirates. The term didn't make her smile anymore. There was nothing funny about them. They were thieves and terrorists and killers, and they kept this woman as a kind of human shield. They might have had her for years and they probably intended to keep her for years more, until despair killed her. And if they'd been where she could reach them, she'd have killed every one of them with any weapon that came to hand, or failing that, with her hands alone. The only word for that was
hatred
.

“Are you going to arrest me?” asked Graves timidly.

“Not my decision,” said Hazel roughly, and accurately. “You'll certainly be interviewed under caution. Then it'll be up to the Crown Prosecution Service.”

“They'll kill her.”

“You don't know that.”

“They said they'd kill her if I stopped helping them. They said they'd kill her if I stopped talking to them. They said if I went to the police, they'd kill her.”

Hazel was too tired to lie. “Then they probably will.”

Graves stared at her. “You're all right with that?”

“Of course I'm not all right with that!” Hazel retorted fiercely. “But there's nothing I can do to prevent it. They're operating in a lawless state thousands of miles away, and even if we knew where they were holding her, there'd be nothing we could do to help her. The people we
can
help, the lives we can save, are the people flying those two or three planes a year that go missing. And the people your weapons are killing who'll go home to their wives when the shipments can be sure of reaching their authorized end users again.”

The sound of a computer filtered in from an adjoining room. Graves's eyes flared wide. “I think that's them.”

Fear knotted a cold hand about Hazel's entrails. She wasn't ready for this. She wasn't capable of dealing with this. But there was no one to hand it over to, and no time to find someone. She swallowed hard. “What makes you think so?”

“Because that's why I come here! I can't talk to them in my office, can I, and I can't talk to them at home. There's a computer here that I use. It's set up to receive satellite video calls.”

“Who lives here?”

Graves shook that off. “A friend. She's gone abroad for a while. I keep an eye on the place for her.” His chin came up in a kind of terrified defiance. “Should I take that or not?”

“What'll happen if you don't?”

“I don't know,” Graves said. “I always have. They let me know when I need to be here, and I wait for their call.”

Every instinct Hazel possessed was telling her that he shouldn't take the call. That they had to buy time, and use it to pass the matter over to the proper authorities. She wasn't even sure who the proper authorities were, but the Cambridge police would either know or find out. It would probably involve the Home Office and the Foreign Office as well. Decisions at the highest level. And none of them,
none
, to be taken by a twenty-six-year-old probationary constable on sick leave because right now her judgment was considered suspect.