by Jo Bannister
Still, now and again, he managed to surprise her. ‘We’re going to London?’
‘If that’s where Dave is, and that’s where Miss Lim is, it makes sense to meet him there. We’ll take him your phone.’
‘But I don’t know where he is! London’s a bit bigger than Norbold, you know?’
‘You will know where he is, when he phones you. In the meantime, we can be halfway there.’
‘Dave isn’t the only one who could have Lim’s phone traced. Superintendent Maybourne could do it.’
‘If she does it, Division will hear about it. If Dave does it, he’ll go through Scotland Yard. I bet Miss Lim would rather deal with the Yard.’
Hazel leaned back against the wall of books, regarding him. ‘Where is my friend Gabriel, and what have you done with him? The last time we talked about this, you were dead set against us getting involved.’
‘The last time we talked, I believed Elizabeth Lim was probably safe. Now I don’t.’
Hazel nodded. ‘Your car or mine? Mine’s outside, but we’ll have to drop Patience off at Highfield Road before we leave anyway.’
Ash caught his dog’s indignant glance. ‘Actually, I don’t think we should waste any more time. Will you drive? Give me your phone – I’ll talk to Dave when he calls.’
They were barely onto the motorway before the phone rang – or at least, played the opening bars of the ‘Policeman’s Song’ from The Pirates of Penzance. If Gorman was surprised that Ash answered, it didn’t show in his voice.
He had left ACC-Crime to his Black Forest gateau and checked his phone before heading back to Norbold. He listened without interrupting as Ash explained the situation. The case for meeting in London rather than at Meadowvale was not spelled out, but was understood as well as if it had been. ‘Where shall we find you?’
There was only one answer to that. ‘Scotland Yard.’
Gorman had a head start on them: he was coming out of Scotland Yard as Hazel and Ash were coming in. For a moment his focus tripped over the sight of Patience leading the way, a picture as improbable here as it was familiar in Norbold. ‘Er …’
Hazel gave a weary sigh. ‘Don’t ask. What’s the state of play? Can we get our phone tapped?’
‘Technically speaking, it’s a phone hack,’ said Gorman, who’d been corrected on the same subject half an hour earlier. ‘And yes, we can. Of course, Lim may have realised her mistake and dumped the phone after talking to you. But before we start the ball rolling …’ There he hesitated. He almost seemed to be embarrassed.
Hazel was curious. ‘What?’
Gorman grimaced. Screwed up like this, his homely face appeared positively Neanderthal. ‘I know this is a stupid question. But before we put ourselves in the hands of the boffins, I suppose you have tried calling her back?’
There was a lengthy pause. Then Ash admitted, ‘No, we didn’t. I suggested tracing the phone, and we never got round to trying the blindingly bleeding obvious first.’ His frustration with himself was evidenced by the uncharacteristic invective.
‘She won’t answer,’ said Hazel quickly. ‘I mean, that’s how she’s stayed safe this long – by avoiding contact with almost anyone who could link her to her old life. She’s not going to change that now. Why would she?’
‘Because what worked in the past isn’t working any more,’ said Ash. ‘If the Harbingers found James, she has to assume they may be close to finding her. She may be rethinking her strategy.’
‘Actually,’ said Gorman, ‘the strategy worked just fine. The Harbingers didn’t find James. The Chinese boy in Bermondsey is not and never was James Cho.’
Hazel stared at him in astonishment. It had never occurred to her to wonder. Elizabeth Lim had told her that her brother was dead, and there was the evidence in the paper. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely sure,’ said Gorman. ‘I talked to the SIO. It was a nineteen-year-old kid caught pushing drugs in the wrong nightclub. His mother’s down at the morgue now, identifying him. James Cho will be in his mid-thirties now. There’s no way it could be him.’
‘Elizabeth saw the same report we did, and jumped to the same conclusion,’ guessed Ash. ‘And she has no way of discovering the truth, unless the newspaper follows the story up in more detail, but that could be days from now. She still thinks her brother has been murdered.’
‘Call her,’ said Gorman.
‘She won’t answer.’ But Hazel was already looking for the number.
At least Lim had not destroyed her phone; nor did it go straight to voice mail. But it went unanswered for so long that Hazel was about to ring off when suddenly there was a silence at the other end that meant her call had been picked up. She nodded at Gorman, who moved closer.
‘Elizabeth? Elizabeth – don’t ring off. It’s Hazel Best. I have some really good news for you. That wasn’t James who was murdered in Bermondsey, it was a teenage drug pusher who fell foul of a rival gang.’
She thought she heard an intake of breath; nothing more.
‘Did you hear me? It wasn’t James. I’m at Scotland Yard now with Detective Inspector Gorman, and he’s spoken to the senior investigating officer. He knows who the victim was, and it wasn’t your brother.’
Gorman was gesturing for the phone. ‘Miss Lim? DI Gorman. Hazel’s telling you the truth. Unless you have some other reason to believe he’s come to harm, James is as safe today as he was a week ago.
‘What we don’t know is whether either of you is safe enough. You made a mistake when you called Hazel – if you hadn’t answered your phone we could have traced it. And what we can do legally, other people can do illegally. It’s hard to disappear completely if someone’s determined enough to find you. You may have left other clues, or James may have done. I want you to consider coming back with me, letting us keep you safe. Next time your brother calls your vicar friend, I’ll tell him the same thing.’
Hazel heard the snort, half derision, half despair, from an arm’s length away. ‘Back to Norbold? Are you mad? They found me there once already. They know who I am.’
‘But we didn’t know who you are. Now we do, we can protect you.’
‘The way you protected my parents? I’m sorry, Inspector, but you must understand how little confidence I have in Norbold police!’
‘I do understand that,’ said Gorman, his voice low. ‘You were badly let down. You may think it was worse than that – that you were sold out. I thought so too, for a time. That’s how it looked: as if people whose job it was to protect you took the conscious decision to protect themselves instead. But I don’t think that’s what happened. I’ve looked into it, I’ve talked to people who were directly involved, and I honestly think that circumstances conspired to make a succession of wretched coincidences look like dereliction of duty. And then the people who should have been looking after your family’s interests got scared and defensive, and hoped that if nobody rocked the boat, the storm would blow over.
‘Maybe you don’t want to gamble your safety on my best guess. All I can do is assure you that I haven’t finished asking questions – that I won’t finish until I’m satisfied I have the whole picture, and that no one’s managed to airbrush themselves out of it. In the meantime, I don’t think you have any reason to be afraid of Norbold police. I know you have no reason to be afraid of me.’
More silence. Perhaps she was thinking it over. Or perhaps she’d quietly dropped the phone into a bin and walked away.
‘Can we at least meet and talk about it?’ asked Gorman. ‘Hazel and Gabriel Ash are here. We could all get together and figure out the best thing for you to do next. Name a place: we’ll meet you anywhere. If I can’t convince you that you’ll be safer coming back with us, I won’t stop you leaving and I won’t try to find you again.’
She hadn’t walked away. After a long moment she came up with a name. ‘It’s a coffee shop in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum. I’ll see you in there at nine.’
Gorman drove, with Ash giv
ing directions. ‘We used to bring the boys here, when they were … well, far too young to appreciate it, actually. There’s the coffee shop.’ He sounded a little surprised. ‘It’s had a bit of a makeover since I was here last.’
Gorman found somewhere to park. ‘Let me do the talking, will you?’ He was looking rather pointedly at Hazel. ‘I don’t want to scare her off. I just need her to listen to reason and make a rational decision.’
‘And if her rational decision is to go on trusting her own skills to keep her safe?’ Hazel raised an interrogative eyebrow.
‘Then that’s her choice. I won’t like it. I’m pretty sure it’d be a bad idea. But I shan’t try to force her to accept our help.’
The golden rule of rendezvous is, Always be the first to arrive. And it was as well they were early, because the first problem presented itself on the pavement outside the coffee shop.
‘I can’t take Patience inside,’ said Ash.
It might have occurred to one of them that this would be a problem before now. But in an odd way they almost forgot she was a dog. She was so much a part of what they did together that both Ash and Hazel tended to think of her more as a dog-shaped person, and not comment on the difference just as well-brought-up people didn’t comment on another’s lack of stature, excess of substance or eye-popping acne.
Hazel peered round anxiously. If Lim arrived and didn’t see them, she would leave and they might never manage to contact her again. ‘Can’t you …?’
If she suggests tying me to the railings, Patience said for Ash’s ears only, the answer is No.
But Hazel was looking at Gorman. ‘… Deputise her or something? Make her a temporary acting police dog?’
Gorman treated the suggestion with the disdain it deserved.
‘You go ahead,’ said Ash. ‘Patience and I will wait out here. It’s you two Lim needs to talk to anyway. It’s you who have to gain her trust.’
So Norbold’s finest headed into the café, taking their time, scanning the customers who were already inside. Elizabeth Lim wasn’t among them.
Ash looked across at the museum and gave a nostalgic little sigh. It was years since he’d been in London with enough leisure to stand in one of the great hubs of civilisation and observe the city orbiting around him. Because the forecourt of the British Museum is not merely an entrance, it’s a venue in its own right. Any time the museum is open, and quite often when it’s shut, it’s filled with Londoners, with tourists, with students, with many-accented voices struggling to be heard, with the cut-and-thrust of intellectual debate, with bus-loads of excited children who’ve crossed England to see the mummies, with mummies hunting in panic for mislaid children. If you haven’t time enough to see much of London, you can do worse than sit on the steps of the British Museum and let London come to you.
That’s what he did now. Though the galleries had closed three hours earlier, there was still a buzz of activity on the plaza outside. Patience at his side, Ash crossed the road and strolled through the forecourt to the broad stone steps where, heedless of his clothes – even at the peak of his earning capacity he’d tended to look as if he dressed from a rummage sale – he sat down to watch London being sociable on a summer evening.
Elizabeth Lim, formerly Felicity Cho, came and stood in front of him. ‘Good evening, Mr Ash.’
Ash stood up quickly, brushing grit from his trousers. ‘Miss Lim. Or …?’
She heard the unspoken question, darted him a fleeting smile. ‘Elizabeth Lim has been my name for a very long time.’
‘Detective Inspector Gorman and Constable Best went into the coffee shop.’ He gestured at Patience. ‘We thought we’d wait over here. Shall I phone Hazel, tell her you’re on your way? Or ask them to join us here?’
‘In a minute.’ She leaned her back against the handrail and turned her face to the sky. She looked very tired. Fear will do that. ‘How much do you know, Mr Ash?’
‘Most of it, I suppose. Except who’s doing this to you.’
That made her look at him. ‘Jerome Harbinger, of course. Who else would it be?’
He gave an apologetic little shrug. ‘It is the likeliest explanation. What we’re short of is proof. He’s angry enough, but frail.’
Lim’s dark almond eyes narrowed. ‘My father didn’t get the chance to grow old and frail.’
Ash winced as if she’d accused him of something. ‘I know. I heard what happened.’
‘Which version?’ Her voice had a steel string running through it, vibrating with the rage she’d learned to contain. ‘The one where he was murdered because of someone else’s mistakes? Or the convenient one, where he drove off a steep road on a frosty night?’
‘Both,’ admitted Ash. ‘Whose mistakes? The police?’
Lim shook her head. He’d never seen her with her hair down before; it made her look like a different person. ‘The police, yes. But also the people my father worked for. They put him in an impossible position.’
Patience lay down, curled like a stone greyhound on a gatehouse pillar, as if she knew they weren’t going to be moving soon. Ash thought the same, and sat down again, spreading his handkerchief as a somewhat inadequate picnic rug for Lim. After a moment she took it.
Ash said, ‘What happened?’
EIGHTEEN
‘You’ll have been told my father wasn’t very good at his job,’ Elizabeth Lim said softly. ‘That isn’t true. In fact he was very good at his job. He was an accountant. The auditors who reviewed the accounts of Cavendo Security after his death said they were exemplary. Exemplary.’ She said it again with quiet satisfaction.
‘But he was not just an accountant. He took over much of the work of the office, leaving the security experts free to do the job they knew. He made such a contribution to the success of the company that he was offered a partnership.’
‘He didn’t take it?’ Ash thought she wouldn’t have put it that way if he had.
‘He intended to take it,’ said Lim carefully. ‘But he wanted to learn every aspect of the business first, not just the financial side. He began working with the various specialists. He learned about financial fraud and identity theft, and insurance fraud, and insider trading – all the competencies Cavendo had amassed over the years. And now he was learning about hostage negotiation.
‘This is not a major part of security work in England,’ she explained. ‘Mostly Cavendo were consulted about personnel and assets seized abroad. There were parts of the world where hostage-taking was – probably still is – an important local industry.’
‘I know,’ Ash said quietly.
‘So my father was shadowing Cavendo’s chief negotiator, learning how he worked, how he resolved situations. Not with the intention of doing that work himself, but so that he would understand the issues that came up at directors’ meetings. So that he would know what he was voting for or against. He wanted to do a good job. He always only wanted to do a good job.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Things happen quickly in the security industry. You cannot always know who will be needed and when. Cavendo undertook to have specialists available twenty-four/seven.’ She leaned forward then and began to stroke Patience. The dog lifted her head, pressing against the woman’s hand.
‘It was a family wedding. The chief negotiator had gone to a family wedding. He’d followed protocol and told the office where he’d be, and there shouldn’t have been a problem. But people drink at family weddings. They meet people they haven’t seen for years, and spend long enough with them to remember why they’ve been avoiding one another, and there are bottles on every table for the toasts, and when they run low, others appear … When the call came in, the chief negotiator wasn’t drunk, but he was too drunk to drive and too drunk to work. He had the office call my father.
‘It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do,’ Lim conceded. ‘It should have been a simple negotiation. It concerned property rather than persons, and the exchange would be conducted in England rather than halfway round the world.
Even if the negotiation failed, it should only have meant the insurers meeting a bill they’d expected all along. It must have seemed a safe enough task for a less experienced negotiator. And my father had been working with the specialist for some time by then. The company was happy to entrust the matter to him.
‘Only after the police interrupted the exchange, starting a train of events which ended with the deaths of Mrs Harbinger and her chauffeur, did the directors of Cavendo decide that my father’s handling of the task had been misguided from the beginning. They all remembered advising him to do it differently. They reported finding him stubborn and intransigent. They accused him of having informed the police of the proposed exchange in the hope of both regaining the painting and retaining the ransom, and then lying about it.
‘In short, Mr Ash, his colleagues used my father as their scapegoat. They abandoned him to the fury of Jerome Harbinger.’
Ash hesitated for a moment, unsure whether what he was proposing to say would make her feel better or worse. But he thought she would want to know, and that anyway it would come out soon enough now, and she deserved to hear it from him rather than reading it in a newspaper. ‘He didn’t tell the police. DI Gorman can confirm that. They had no idea what was going on at the supermarket that night. One of the gang was recognised by a routine patrol as a person of interest in a previous robbery: he was followed to the car park where the exchange was to take place, and an Armed Response Unit were sent to make the arrest.’
One great tear gathered in the corner of each almond eye as Elizabeth Lim stared at him. ‘Truly? You can prove that my father kept his word? That he didn’t gamble with Mrs Harbinger’s life in order to safeguard the insurers’ profits?’
Ash nodded. ‘It was a terrible coincidence. Your father promised Harbinger the police wouldn’t be informed, and they weren’t. They stumbled on what they thought was an armed robbery, and acted accordingly.’