by Jo Bannister
‘But just because we don’t know where she is, doesn’t mean they don’t know. If you can make a phone-call and get her some help, and you won’t because now you don’t need his help any more you don’t want Philip Thing taking up your precious time … well, I thought better of you.’
Her assessment may not have been entirely fair, but it stung as if it was. ‘Hazel, I can’t carry the world’s problems on my shoulders! I’ve only just figured out how to carry my own. I’m sorry if Miss Lim is in trouble, but she has the same recourse as everyone else – the police on the end of a phone-line. There’s no reason to suppose there’s a security dimension. It could be anything from a gambling debt to a spurned lover looking for her. I’m not going cap-in-hand to Philip Welbeck again because a woman I hardly know has decided to drop off the radar for a while. Whatever he owed me, he has already paid.’
‘He owed you four years!’
‘He helped me get my children back.’
Hazel went on staring hotly at him. But she had no answer to that. She knew that the most important things in Gabriel Ash’s life were his sons, and at least in part it was thanks to his old boss that he was raising them instead of mourning them.
If she was ruthlessly honest with herself – and Hazel tried to be honest with everyone – she harboured just a little resentment that the lonely, broken man she’d adopted as an act of charity had now so much going on in his life that there was less time for the kind of things they’d done together. They’d helped people who needed help, and obtained justice for some who were beyond it. And those were things that were important to Hazel, both as a human being and a police officer. Now Ash was so busy being … normal … she felt obscurely abandoned.
Which is perhaps what made her say, in a piqued tone, ‘If you don’t want to call him, maybe I should.’
Ash’s deep dark eyes flared with alarm. ‘Hazel, don’t go anywhere near those people. You don’t want to get involved with them.’
Taken aback by his insistence, she only protested mildly: ‘Gabriel – you’re one of those people.’
‘Not any more. Not for a long time, and never again. You know what it cost me. It cost me my marriage, and four years of my sons’ childhood, and it damn near cost me my sanity. No one who walks into that place walks out unscathed. It … taints people. I don’t want it tainting you.’
She gave a dismissive little snort; but in fact she was touched by his concern. She had never been entirely sure what to call the connection between her and Ash – friendship didn’t quite seem to cover it, yet there wasn’t a word that got closer – but it was reassuring to know that he felt it too, that he put as much value on it as she did, and that he wanted to protect her even from things she needed no protection from. ‘All right,’ she said meekly.
‘You’ll let it drop?’
‘I’ll let it drop.’ Hazel Best wasn’t someone who went back on her word lightly. When she gave it, she had every intention of keeping it.
Still, the next morning, which was a Thursday, she made a point of hovering in the corridor where CID had their offices, just in case DI Gorman came looking for her. He didn’t. Twice she glimpsed his back before his door closed, and once she saw him thumping the coffee machine at the top of the stairs. But by the time she got there he’d given up trying to get sense, or indeed coffee, out of it and hurried on with his day.
So when she came off shift she went and knocked on his door. As a CID officer, he was unaccustomed to people hunting for him – it was usually the other way round – and he called, ‘Come in,’ when he probably should have asked, ‘Who is it?’
Hazel gave him a friendly smile. ‘Are you trying to avoid me?’
Gorman decided that honesty was the best policy. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re going to ask me about Elizabeth Lim, and I can’t tell you anything.’
She thought he was frustrated with his own lack of progress. ‘The answers will come when you find the right questions to ask and the right people to ask them of.’
The DI scowled. ‘I’m not asking any questions.’
That was surprising. ‘Why not?’
‘Because Sir told me not to.’
Meadowvale Police Station warranted a detective superintendent. But after the unfortunate business with Chief Superintendent Fountain, appointing his replacement took priority, so Dave Gorman – with the comparatively modest rank of detective inspector – was the de facto head of CID in Norbold. Superintendent Maybourne was his superior, but to be outranked by a detective he had to look further afield.
‘Division have been in touch?’
Gorman shook his head, looking guilty. ‘Headquarters. Sir of Sirs.’
‘ACC-Crime?’ Hazel was astonished. ‘Why?’
‘He thinks I should have more important things to do. If I haven’t, he reckons he can find me some.’
‘More important than looking for a woman who’s vanished following a kidnap attempt?’ Hazel’s voice soared in disbelief.
‘Sir pointed out that it was Frankie Kelly, not Elizabeth Lim, who was nearly kidnapped. He takes the view that Lim was free to leave her job if she chose to – she’s a competent adult, and she hasn’t reported a crime or asked us for help. He doesn’t want to hear any more about it.’
‘But that’s crazy!’ cried Hazel in exasperation. ‘He can’t really believe it was a coincidence that she disappeared only hours after I warned her she was in danger.’ Too late she remembered that wasn’t something to boast about: she hurried on, hoping he hadn’t noticed. ‘And what about her fake ID? Dave, there’s obviously something going on, and it’s Lim at the heart of it, not Frankie. You can’t just shut the file on it.’
‘I can if I’m ordered to. Unless something else happens,’ he added gruffly, ‘in which case I’ll do what needs doing and ACC-Crime can shout at me later. But nothing else is going to happen – not here, not now Lim has gone.’
A sly look slid sideways into Hazel’s usually open expression. ‘He told you not to spend any more time on it. I don’t expect he said anything about me.’
‘As a matter of fact he did,’ growled Gorman. ‘He said not even to think of involving you. He said letting you get involved was like taking out a front-page advert in the Birmingham Post. He said if he heard you’d been sniffing around, I’d be directing traffic and you’d be looking for lost dogs.’
Hazel shook her head, bemused. It was slightly alarming to think that ACC-Crime even knew the name of one of his newest constables in dusty Norbold, about as far from headquarters as it was possible to get. Of course, her name would have crossed his desk before this.
She frowned. ‘Why should he care?’
The DI had been too busy dodging flak to ask himself that. ‘Because he’s this force’s senior detective?’
‘That’s a good reason for us to avoid annoying him,’ conceded Hazel. ‘But why would he be annoyed? You’re just doing your job.’
‘He thinks it’s a waste of time.’ But now Gorman was wondering why, too.
Hazel shrugged. ‘A lot of the things we do are a waste of time. That’s not a good enough reason for giving up before we even start. Why does ACC-Crime want to stop you investigating a serious incident outside Norbold Quays?’
‘He doesn’t believe the two are connected – the kidnap attempt and Elizabeth Lim going off-grid.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Hazel, heavily ironic. ‘A coincidence? Like the way Christmas always falls in December?’ She paused to consider. ‘So what are you going to do? Pretend it never happened? Roll over and play dead?’
Gorman bristled. As a single man, he wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to like this. He made allowances for Hazel only because of their history: of those lonely weeks when she’d stood out for the integrity of Meadowvale Police Station and he’d been one of the few colleagues who hadn’t pilloried her for it. If she’d been left with a mistrust of senior officers, it was no wonder. ‘That’s right. My boss t
old me to drop the bone, and I’m going to drop it before he smacks me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.’
Though she was disappointed, Hazel understood that DI Gorman wasn’t a free agent. His orders came down the chain of command. If the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) wanted him to abandon an investigation, he had to assume there was a good reason. Already she was regretting her intemperance. ‘You can’t really butt heads with ACC-Crime.’
‘No.’ Gorman was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
‘Maybe some day we’ll hear what it was all about.’
‘Maybe.’ One heavy eyebrow lowered even further, making him look like a quizzical bull. ‘So you’re going to roll over too? I’m impressed. I didn’t expect you to be this … reasonable.’
Hazel gave an impatient shake of the head. Her fair hair was down to her shoulders. ‘And here we go again with the stereotyping! It’s not my fault every time something weird happens in Norbold. I do not go around looking for trouble!’
He nodded. She nodded. She headed for the door; and as she closed it behind her, the DI heard her add softly: ‘Trouble comes looking for me.’
NINE
Rambles With Books was never going to be a runaway success. People don’t fight over an anthology of nineteenth-century poems in the way that they do over the last fifty-inch television in the January sales. It was never difficult to find Ash alone in his shop.
But Hazel’s heart sank at the dearth of customers. Not so much for Ash’s sake – he didn’t seem to mind whether he sold many books, could afford to run the place more as a hobby than a commercial venture, and would have been appalled to find himself overrun with shoppers – as her own. If he’d been busy, if there had been anyone else there, she could have made coffee in the little kitchen, and stroked Patience, and gone home with a clear conscience. But he was alone, and he looked up with a smile when he felt her watching him, and Hazel knew that when you have something difficult to do, it’s better to do it sooner rather than later.
She made the coffee anyway. But then she said, in a low voice, looking anywhere but at him, ‘I made you a promise, Gabriel. And I’m going to have to break it.’
He frowned. ‘What promise?’ But before the words were entirely out, recollection struck him. ‘Ah Hazel …’
She hated the disappointment in his voice. ‘I’m sorry. But that woman’s in trouble, and HQ are keeping Dave Gorman from doing anything to help her. They’re hoping that if we all pretend there isn’t a problem, the problem will go away. Well, maybe it will – in the back of a van. If Miss Lim turns up dead in a ditch somewhere, the fact that she never asked us for help won’t be much comfort.’
Ash considered for a moment. ‘What did Dave ask you to do?’
‘He asked me to stay out of it.’
‘What’s he going to do?’
‘The same. No less a personage than ACC-Crime warned him off.’
‘What are you going to do?’
When she was thinking, Hazel’s eyebrows pinched the top of her nose. ‘We know where and when Lim went to university, and we know there’s no record of her under that name before 2001. I’m going to look for some reason an intelligent, ambitious Chinese sixth-former would go to university as someone else.’
For his part, Ash was less surprised by this turn of events than he should have been, and less worried than he might have been. Nothing she might learn about events at the school, not even the possibility that she might raise hackles at police headquarters again, troubled him as much as the possibility that Philip Welbeck might make her an offer Hazel wouldn’t want to refuse. As long as Welbeck was in London, and Hazel was following her hunches in Norbold, she was probably safe from him.
Which didn’t make what she was proposing to do a good idea. ‘And if ACC-Crime gets wind of it?’
She shrugged. ‘HQ hate me already. They think they can’t trust me to be sensible and just do my job and go home at the end of my shift, and keep my nose out of the kind of things that are too difficult to sort out. The kind of things that, even if you find the answers, no one’s going to be grateful.’
‘Well – they’re right, aren’t they? They can’t trust you to do that.’
Hazel glared at him. ‘But I don’t work for HQ. Yes, they hired me, and they pay my salary every month, but the people I work for are the people of Norbold. They’re the ones who’re entitled to my loyalty. Chief Superintendent Fountain forgot who it is that pays the piper, and half the time HQ forget it as well. And I don’t want to forget.
‘Them’ – she waved a hand towards the street beyond the shop door – ‘the people out there, they’re why I do the job. To keep them safe, so they can get on with their lives without having to worry who’s lurking round the corner. To make sure the little guy’s protected from the big guns. When senior police officers start thinking some crimes aren’t worth investigating, the one who suffers is the little guy. That’s not good enough. If the little guy’s always going to get dumped on, what’s the point of living in a democracy? What’s the point of an independent police service? If Elizabeth Lim’s problems aren’t worth my time, I don’t know what the point of being a police officer is.’
‘It’s possible,’ suggested Ash, ‘that those senior police officers know more about all this than you realise. That if you had the same information, you’d understand why they’re declining to get involved. They may know there’s no need to.’
‘Then why don’t they say that? Let us know what’s going on?’
‘Because if they’ve decided that the best course of action is no action, they won’t want to say so officially. That’s just how it works, Hazel. Sometimes, anything you do is going to cause more harm than good. Sometimes, nothing is the least worst option. It’s called using your discretion. But it’s hard to do if you have to justify the decision publicly. I think you have to just hope that everyone’s acting for the best. That Elizabeth Lim knew what she was doing when she packed her bags and left town, and headquarters know what they’re doing by taking no further action.’
‘You mean, I should let them muzzle me too?’
Ash chuckled fondly. ‘Hazel, no one who knows you thinks you’ll consent to being muzzled if something needs talking about. I just want you to consider the possibility that this is something that doesn’t.’
‘Kidnapping is a serious crime!’
‘Of course it is. But maybe the situation has already been resolved. For all we know, Miss Lim may have known exactly where to go to get help. Steps may already have been taken to ensure that she won’t be troubled any more.’
‘Then why did she leave town?’
‘That may have been the price she had to pay.’
‘You really think so?’ Hazel sounded deeply unconvinced. ‘That I should forget all about it?’
Ash nodded solemnly. ‘Yes. You haven’t enough information to work with anyway. But just trying, when Dave Gorman has been told to drop it, will be noticed, and not in a good way. You don’t need to be making enemies at headquarters.’
‘More enemies,’ Hazel corrected him absently. ‘I suppose you’re right. We can’t solve every mystery we come across.’
‘No.’
She gave in with a bad grace. ‘Oh, all right. I’ll be good.’
‘Good.’
It’s no wonder that primitive civilisations believed gods were playing games with their lives. That gods on Olympus or other mountaintops – almost the only thing that believers ever agreed on was that gods were up there rather than down there, as if a head for heights was an essential attribute in a deity – got their kicks from manoeuvring humans into tricky situations and running a book on how, or if, they’d extricate themselves. Sometimes it’s the only way to explain how events conspire to send us cannoning off in improbable directions.
So perhaps it was a quiet day on Olympus, and Hermes had no messages to run and Aphrodite’s mirror was in for re-silvering, and one of them, yawning, glanced down on Norbold and drawled,
‘I suppose we could always have a bit of fun with that one again …’
Otherwise we’re left to think it was nothing more than coincidence that soon after Hazel clocked on at Meadowvale a report came in of a stray child, too young and distraught to be making sense, at the railway station, and Hazel as the closest WPC was despatched to deal with it.
She arrived about thirty seconds after the child’s mother, who had made the fundamental error of believing that a four-year-old would stay with the bags while she went for a trolley just because he said he would. By then the little boy was calming down, his mother was sufficiently recovered to be furious with him, and Hazel was surplus to requirements. Walking back to Meadowvale took her past the little office over the paper shop that was Martha Harris’s.
Martha was just parking her car. ‘Come up for a coffee.’
Hazel hesitated. It wasn’t a strictly legitimate use of police time, although good relations between the police and any private investigators on their manor were in the best interests of both. ‘They’re expecting me back at Meadowvale.’
‘Come up for a coffee, and an informal chinwag you might find mildly interesting.’
Hazel was intrigued. ‘An informal chinwag about what?’
‘A certain missing person.’
Hazel hesitated no longer.
She was a lot younger than Martha, and a lot fitter, and she waited impatiently as the PI laboured up the stairs. Even then Martha wasn’t ready to talk until she was seated at her desk with her shoes kicked off, and a steaming mug and the chocolate-box open in front of her.
Then she said, ‘Does the name Jerome Harbinger mean anything to you?’
It did, although for a moment Hazel couldn’t think why. ‘I’ve seen it on the side of lorries. Those maroon ones with the gold lettering.’
‘You have, pet. He’s a big road transport man. I say is, though he’s retired now. He was a real self-made man – born with nothing, worth millions by the time he was forty.’