by Jo Bannister
‘But then the storm-clouds parted and Edward Cho drove into the Clover Hill dam. So hey, guys, there’s our scapegoat – if we all agree it was his fault, who’s going to argue?’
‘Only maybe Edward Cho didn’t drive off the road. Maybe he was driven off it,’ said Hazel softly. ‘By Jerome Harbinger, or by someone acting for him. A month later, someone got at Mary Cho too. This time it was made to look like suicide.’
‘You do know what you’re saying?’ breathed Gorman. ‘That the man who is now the senior detective of this force, and probably other senior officers who were part of the decision-making process, opted to ignore two murders because they were afraid of being blamed for the death of Jennifer Harbinger. They started a fire-fight, and Mrs Harbinger was shot dead by a member of the ARU.’
He saw the shock-waves crash through Hazel’s expression. ‘You didn’t know that. Jocelyn Harbinger told me. Everyone who agreed to sending an Armed Response Unit was in a potentially career-ending situation if all the facts came out. It seems they cared more about protecting themselves than the Chos. Seventeen years later, ACC-Crime is still covering his own back rather than doing his job and letting me do mine.’
‘At least he arranged new identities for the Cho children,’ said Hazel, looking desperately for a silver lining.
‘Like hell he did,’ snarled Gorman. ‘That would have meant admitting that Edward and Mary were murdered. If they did that, quietly closing the file and tiptoeing away was no longer an option. They had to maintain the fiction that Edward died in an accident and Mary killed herself, and therefore the children were in no danger.’
‘Then who …?’
‘Cho worked for a security firm, didn’t he? His employers must have done it. That’s why we have no record of it.’
‘We need to talk to them. What was their name?’ Hazel flicked through her notes. ‘Cavendo Security.’
Gorman lowered one bushy eyebrow at her. ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, that’s right – I did. There’s nothing left of the company. They never recovered from the Harbinger episode. Their negotiator was held responsible for the deaths of Jennifer Harbinger and her chauffeur, and the loss of a valuable painting – none of the big insurers wanted to use them after that. They staggered on for three or four years, then quietly shut up shop and the partners retired to various costas. I haven’t managed to locate anyone who was on the staff at Cavendo seventeen years ago.’
There was a lengthy pause. Finally Hazel said, ‘What are we going to do about Sir?’
‘Ask him if it’s true.’
‘He won’t admit it. And we don’t actually have any evidence.’
‘What else can I do?’ Gorman stared at her angrily. ‘The genie won’t go back in the bottle. I can’t pretend we never figured this out. There are still two lives at stake. Harbinger found Elizabeth Lim – Felicity Cho – though it took him seventeen years to do it. He’ll find her again. And then he’ll find her brother. We cannot stand back and do nothing.’
Hazel felt a great surge of respect for him. Dave Gorman wasn’t a man of remarkable intellectual talents. He was just an ordinary decent man who’d achieved a modest success by dint of hard work and long hours; and now he was going to risk it all trying to undo the harm that had been done by more senior, better-paid officers a generation ago. Hazel had no doubt what would happen then. ACC-Crime would call in some favours and his colleagues at headquarters would close ranks to protect him, because he’d do the same for them. They’d hold the line, and hold out for their pensions and their Birthday Honours, and DI Gorman would be remembered – when he was remembered at all – as a detective with a promising future behind him.
Hazel knew this because it had almost happened to her. She knew that Gorman knew it too; and she also knew that knowing how it had to end wouldn’t alter his view of what he had to do.
‘If you’re going to see Sir,’ she said, her voice husky with trepidation, ‘I’ll come too.’
ACC-Crime had a name, although no one used it and many actually forgot it. His name was Thomas Severick, he was fifty-eight years old, and he’d been born in the shadow of Pendle Hill. He spoke with a strong northern accent, though it had taken some effort to maintain it this long. He told people that if they sawed his leg off, it would have Lancashire written through it, like a stick of Blackpool rock.
He was the kind of northerner who took a pride in the poverty of his forebears that he would not have taken had they been well-to-do. ‘Call that hardship?’ he was wont to hoot at startled Londoners. ‘We’d have thought a digestive biscuit with a candle on it was a smashing birthday cake. I mind the day twelve of us shared a pea …’
Because he was large, and loud, and inclined to boast about things most people would prefer to keep private, it was easy to overlook the most important thing about him, which was that he was very good at his job. You don’t become an assistant chief constable without being. You particularly don’t become Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) without impressing people time and again with your abilities, your dedication and a track record for making lucky guesses. This may be described as intuition, it may be described as instinct; whatever you call it, it means that when the chips are down and there’s nothing to tell you which way to go, more often than not you make the right call. It’s not something that can be taught, it’s not even something that can be learnt, but it’s a priceless talent for a police officer. Tom Severick had it. He had always had it.
He made one of his lucky calls as recently as this week, when he accepted an invitation to speak to students at Hendon Police College. It was a last-minute decision that had his wife hastily pressing his dinner jacket, his driver apologising to her boyfriend, and his secretary shuffling the bookings in his diary like a Mississippi gambler. But it also put him eighty miles away when DI Gorman from Meadowvale Police Station in Norbold arrived at headquarters, seeking an urgent interview.
For a moment Gorman thought it was a lie, that the man had somehow guessed his number had come up and was cowering in his office, making desperate Don’t send him up gestures at his secretary. Then reality intervened. It was unlikely that ACC-Crime knew why Gorman wanted to see him. He had no reason to think his actions of seventeen years ago were coming back to haunt him now.
The secretary offered Gorman an appointment the following week. Gorman took it, but only to avoid further discussion. His business with ACC-Crime wouldn’t wait till next week. If he didn’t do this immediately, two really bad things could happen. One was that Elizabeth Lim, who needed the protection that was currently being denied her, could be found dead. The other was that he might find a reason not to do it at all. Dave Gorman worried sometimes, late at night in the privacy of his own head, that he wasn’t good enough, strong enough or brave enough to do all the things he expected of himself.
He checked his diary. There was nowhere he had to be tonight. Hendon was a couple of hours down the motorway. If anything trivial came up, DS Presley would deal with it; if anything urgent came up, he could race back. Fighting the desperate hope that something urgent would come up, he let Presley know he was going out – he did not let Hazel know – and headed for the M2.
SIXTEEN
Hazel found out later that afternoon, when she called to ask when Gorman meant to beard the lion and learned that he was out and not expected back until after the weekend. She tried his mobile, but he didn’t answer, and by then she didn’t expect him to. Fuming, she went round to Rambles With Books.
‘Dave Gorman’s gone to have it out with ACC-Crime.’
‘Yes?’ Ash was ringing up a sale. It wasn’t a big sale, but any sale was still a bit of an event and he liked to squeeze the full measure of enjoyment out of it.
‘I told him I’d go with him.’
‘Ah.’
Her jaw jutted pugnaciously. ‘Ah what?’
‘If he’d wanted you to go with him, he’d have told you he was going. If he didn’t, that’s because he wanted to go alone.’
> ‘But why?’
Ash sighed and put his ledger down. ‘I’m only guessing, but it could be because you’ve developed a habit of spreading troubled waters on oil. I know you think you’re right about this. You may well be. But Dave Gorman is more likely to get at the truth by talking to Severick calmly than if you march in there full of righteous indignation.’
‘I don’t …’ she mumbled; but she knew that she did.
‘What are you afraid of? That Dave will let himself be shouted down? You know him better than I do, but I know him better than that. If he has enough evidence to confront Severick, he’ll be ready for whatever response the man makes. Be patient, Hazel. Dave will sort it out, regardless of whose toes he has to tread on.’
‘What if we’re wrong?’ But that wasn’t honest either, and she amended it. ‘What if I’m wrong?’
‘About ACC-Crime? That’ll be pretty embarrassing. I don’t suppose either you or Dave will be on his Christmas card list this year. But what else is he going to do? Sack you? If police officers got sacked for interviewing people who turned out not to have committed crimes, there’d be no one left to direct the traffic. If it’s all a series of unfortunate coincidences, that’s what Severick will say, and he’ll produce either the evidence or a good enough explanation to prove it. Then he and Gorman will get their heads together and find a way to help the Chos.
‘But if you’re right, nothing Severick says will matter – he won’t have the power to damage either of you for very much longer. Be patient, Hazel,’ he said again. His dog, thinking she heard her name, pushed her long nose into his hand and he stroked her automatically. ‘The world turns, even without you pushing it.’
‘I know. It’s just … there must be something I could be doing. I can’t just wait for the phone to ring so Dave can tell me if I’ve made an idiot of myself. Not that I have,’ she added robustly. ‘This is not the craziest thing I’ve thought that turned out to be right. You know what they say about women.’
Gabriel Ash hadn’t had a very liberal education: a lot of the things they say about women had entirely passed him by. It explained a great deal about him. ‘Deadlier than the male?’ he hazarded.
Hazel scowled. ‘I mean, women’s intuition. Sometimes we know stuff even when we can’t prove it.’
‘Courts rather like you to prove it,’ Ash pointed out. It was six o’clock on a Saturday evening: there was no sign of a mob preparing to wedge his door open so they could shop for second-hand books out of hours, so he turned the lock and pulled down the blind.
‘Preparing a court case and solving a crime are two different things,’ said Hazel, a shade pompously. ‘Once you know who did what, you can find the evidence for how they did it. Getting the right face in the frame, that’s the trick. And intuition can do that when nothing else can.’
‘Sergeant Mole?’ Hazel was given to quoting her earliest mentor.
‘Mm …?’ Her mind was no longer on the conversation. Her fair brows had drawn together and her forehead wrinkled pensively. ‘Gabriel … what did you say?’
‘Oh Lord.’ He tried desperately to remember. ‘About what?’
‘About the female of the species being more deadly than the male.’ She had the quote more accurate than he had.
Ash nodded. ‘That. Why?’
After half a minute when her attention was tuned inwards, following new connections through the synapses of her brain, she looked up at him. Her voice held the slight, wondering unsteadiness of someone who’d been blindsided on the road to Damascus. ‘Because Jerome Harbinger wasn’t the only one who lost someone dear to him that day. Well, maybe he isn’t capable any more of taking the revenge he aches for. But his daughter is.’
Tom Severick was on his way down to the hotel bar when he glimpsed, just for a moment, a face he thought he knew. Not one of the ACCs and chief superintendents he’d spent much of the day with and now, after a shower and a change of clothes, he was going to have dinner with, but someone younger and not in possession of a dinner jacket. Someone who looked familiar and out of place at the same time. By the time he looked again, eddies in the crowd round the bar had spoiled his line of sight. But he’d been a police officer too long to dismiss it as a trick of the light. He knew what he’d seen, and he knew that in another minute he’d know who he’d seen.
And then he had it. Detective Inspector Dave Gorman, from Meadowvale Police Station in Norbold. It had taken him a moment because, although he’d shouted at him over the phone several times, he’d only met Gorman on a handful of occasions. He hadn’t expected to see him here because, frankly, the gathering was several grades above his pay-scale.
It was getting to be a long time since Tom Severick had pounded the beat. But the instincts he’d honed on the streets, that had served him so well on his ascent of the greasy pole, were as strong now as they ever were. Startled as he was to see Gorman here, he immediately knew two things. That the DI was looking for him, and that he meant trouble.
So when Gorman reappeared out of the throng at his side, wearing a ruffianly sports jacket and an expression of dogged determination, he’d barely opened his mouth to say, ‘Mr Severick, I’m DI Gor—’ before Severick had him by the elbow, steering him firmly towards the vestibule.
‘I know who you are, son,’ he growled softly. ‘I don’t know what the blue blinding blazes you’re doing here, but these people are looking forward to their tea and they don’t need you making a scene and putting them off their prawn cocktail.’ Tom Severick might have left Pendle but Pendle hadn’t left him: in Lancashire you have your dinner in the middle of the working day and your tea when it’s done.
There was a little conference room off reception. Severick shoved Gorman inside ahead of him. He was twenty years older than Gorman, but he was quicker on his feet than he looked. Gorman found himself in the empty room almost without knowing how he’d got there.
‘I’m not here to make a scene,’ he said. ‘But I do need to talk to you about Elizabeth Lim, I need to talk to you now, and I need you to be honest with me.’
Severick stared at him in open astonishment. ‘You pompous little gobshite! What makes you think you’re important enough to be worth lying to?’
Which perhaps wasn’t a convincing assault on the moral high ground, but Gorman knew he was more likely to get the truth out of someone who despised him than someone who was afraid of him.
‘You know who Elizabeth Lim is.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Of course I do.’
‘And you know she’s in danger.’
‘I know you’ve told me that. I haven’t seen much evidence for it.’
‘Two men tried to kidnap her outside her own school!’
‘No, they didn’t. They tried to kidnap a woman who was there collecting children. The children of a man with, let’s say, a curious history. If you want to know what it was all about, don’t come pestering me, talk to Gabriel Ash.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘And while you’re doing that, I’ll go and get my tea.’
Dave Gorman wasn’t easily intimidated. But it’s one thing to face down the upper echelons of the criminal fraternity, another to stand up to your own boss. Even so, and knowing that this time next week he could be reading the ads in the Job Centre window, he moved in front of the door. ‘I’ll buy you a sandwich later. I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve come too far’ – he meant that both ways – ‘to be fobbed off. We sort this out now, or I go through channels. It might have been hushed up for seventeen years. It isn’t being hushed up any longer.’
ACC-Crime was staring at him as if he was mad. ‘Seventeen years? What are you talking about? Seventeen years ago you were breaking in your first set of boots. And I …’
Then something happened, in his face and behind his eyes. The sort of thing that Gorman might have seen if he’d been standing in the right place when someone was hit by a train. The eyes widened and narrowed and widened again. The mouth formed shapes but no words came. Colour moved up Severick’s cheeks in
bands: red then white then red again, like the Latvian flag.
When he finally found a voice, it was quieter, shorn of its habitual bombast; he sounded out of breath. There was no doubting the man had suffered a genuine shock. ‘Elizabeth Lim. Who is she?’
‘You said you knew.’
A flicker of the old arrogance. ‘I said I knew who you were talking about – the head teacher of your local high school who resigned over the phone. But that’s not what you meant, is it?’
Gorman shook his head carefully. As a police officer, he thought he was pretty good at knowing when he was being lied to. But he’d been a police officer long enough to also know that you could never be sure – you could be wrong both ways. Fail to recognise the truth, and fall for a lie. ‘If you don’t know who she is, really is, why were you so anxious for me to drop the case?’
‘Because there wasn’t a case!’ insisted Severick. ‘Only in your head, and the head of that daft girl you spend far too much time listening to. Competent adults who choose to disappear are not police business. You know that. There are all sorts of reasons why people want to slip out of their old lives and start afresh somewhere else. Unless we have reason to believe they are criminals or vulnerable, they have every right to do so without some under-employed detective inspector waving bits of their clothing in front of the nearest bloodhound!
‘We look for missing children. We look for people who are mentally frail or physically ill. We look for old people who might have got on the wrong bus and ended up in Carlisle. We do not look for people who phoned their office to say they wouldn’t be coming in any more, and packed a bag and left town. What Elizabeth Lim did might have seemed out of character, but she’s an intelligent woman and it must have made sense to her. If she’d wanted our help, she’d have asked for it.’