by Jo Bannister
‘Then why didn’t they say so? Why did they let Mr Harbinger believe that my father betrayed him?’ Her voice broke with the pity of it.
All Ash could offer was an apologetic little shrug. ‘Because they were only human. The outcome was so disastrous that the officers who despatched that ARU thought they’d be crucified. They were afraid public opinion would forget who was really responsible – the thieves who brought firearms to the exchange – and blame the police for the deaths of two innocent civilians.
‘They wanted to focus attention on the fact that they’d broken up a criminal gang and recovered most of the items stolen from a valuable collection. They didn’t want to admit that it was random chance that brought them to the car park at the critical moment, because dumb luck doesn’t look as good on your annual report as clever detective work.’
‘But allowing people to think they’d been tipped off left my father to take the blame!’
‘I know,’ murmured Ash. ‘I don’t suppose anyone anticipated what happened next. No one could have guessed how Jerome Harbinger would react.’
‘He murdered my father!’ cried Elizabeth Lim. Her clear voice, her audible distress and the words themselves turned heads for five metres all round. ‘And then, four weeks later, he murdered my mother as well. He said he was going to, and he did. When my father told the police we were all in danger, they told him it was just the grief talking. They told him there was nothing to worry about. That Mr Harbinger would apologise when he calmed down.’ She gave an empty little laugh as deep as despair.
Ash gave her a moment to collect herself. Then he said, ‘And then you and your brother disappeared from the record, and turned up as two other people. I imagine Cavendo helped with that.’
She nodded, the fall of her black hair curtaining her eyes. ‘They said it was the least they could do. I have to say, I agreed.’
‘And you went to university as Elizabeth Lim. Who did James become?’
Lim shook her head. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t share his new identity with me, and I didn’t share mine with him. If Mr Harbinger found one of us, it was necessary that we didn’t know enough to betray the other. All I knew was that he’d gone into banking, that he’d married and had two children, and that he lived in London. All he knew was that I was a teacher working in the Midlands. Our only point of contact was through Martin Wade, and we always called him – he didn’t know how to contact us.’
‘You did well,’ said Ash. ‘It’s easy to disappear – it’s not easy to stay disappeared for seventeen years. Most people can’t resist the temptation to go back at some point. That’s when their past catches up with them.’
‘I suppose I made that mistake as well,’ said Lim thoughtfully. ‘Norbold was too close. I should have done what James did: bury myself in a big city in another part of the country. But I thought seventeen years was long enough for Felicity Cho to have gone for good. And I really wanted that job. I told myself that I’d been away long enough for the trail to go cold, that no one could recognise me as the frightened sixteen-year-old girl I was last time they saw me. It seems I was mistaken.’
‘We’ll get this sorted out now.’ Ash couldn’t imagine what gave him the authority, or the confidence, to promise her that, but he meant it absolutely. ‘This won’t be hanging over your head very much longer.’
‘Mr Harbinger was very rich,’ Lim observed sadly. ‘I believe he still is.’
‘I don’t think that had as big a bearing on the investigation as the fact that he was himself the victim of a tragedy. Did you know that his wife was killed by a police firearm? There were so many regrets and recriminations flying round, I think the police felt they owed it to Harbinger to cut him some slack. They downplayed his outburst instead of recognising it as a genuine threat to your family. Even after your parents died, there was a reluctance to believe that Harbinger was responsible, because they knew what the actions of the police had cost him.
‘Well, all the facts will come out now. Those officers who accepted a convenient fiction – your father’s accident, your mother’s suicide – rather than conducting a thorough investigation will be held to account. A comprehensive inquiry will establish how your parents died, and who’s been threatening you, and bring him to justice.’
He smiled at her. ‘And then you can go back to Norbold Quays, and pick up where you left off, and all you’ll have to worry about will be remembering the birthdays of your nieces and nephews.’
Lim regarded him steadily over the top of Patience’s head. ‘You really think it’s all over?’
‘I think it will all be over very soon.’
Elizabeth Lim rose gracefully from the stone steps, and Ash retrieved his handkerchief, as Hazel and DI Gorman hurried across Great Russell Street. A detached portion of Ash’s brain noticed with amusement that Hazel hadn’t wasted the time she’d been waiting in the café: there was a blob of cream on the tip of her nose.
‘Mr Gorman, Miss Best.’
‘Miss Lim. Or …’
She smiled. ‘We’ve been through that already.’
Dave Gorman wanted to know what else they’d been through while he was buying espressos and chocolate éclairs. But Ash warned him off with a fractional shake of the head.
‘Miss Lim’s coming back to Norbold with us,’ he said. ‘I suggest she rides with you. You can talk on the drive.’
Hazel wanted to hear the story too, so Ash and Patience had Hazel’s car to themselves. Ash drove more slowly than Gorman, but he left London first: Lim had to collect her belongings from the small hotel where she’d been staying.
Patience took the front passenger seat, a concession she met by agreeing to wear her seatbelt. As they reached the motorway she said, You didn’t tell Hazel she had cream on her nose.
Ash barked a little laugh. ‘No, I didn’t.’
You should have done. She’ll be cross when she looks in a mirror.
‘I know.’ Ash was still chuckling as he drove through Watford Gap.
‘Why didn’t you tell me I had cream on my nose?’ demanded Hazel.
‘Had you? I didn’t notice.’
Hazel sniffed, unconvinced.
They were in Ash’s kitchen at Highfield Road. It was gone midnight, and the boys and even Frankie had long ago retired to bed. Patience was sleeping too, curled like a croissant on the sofa with her long head on Ash’s knee.
Ash said pensively, ‘I hope we’ve done the right thing.’
‘Bringing her in from the cold?’ Hazel had a certain fondness for spy fiction. ‘Of course we have. We couldn’t leave her in London, with no friends and nowhere to turn for help. Sooner or later …’ She didn’t finish the sentence.
‘I suppose. But it’s risky, bringing her back to Norbold. Harbinger knows she’s spent the last five years here. Maybe it would have been better to send her off north, somewhere she had no connections.’
‘She had no connections in London,’ Hazel pointed out. ‘We were worried he’d find her anyway. And then the sheer anonymous scale of the place would make it easy for him to get at her and get clean away afterwards. If we’ve finally persuaded the top brass to take the risk seriously, she’s better where people who understand what’s been going on can keep an eye on her.’
‘Assuming the top brass really are taking the risk seriously now.’
Hazel shrugged. ‘Dave Gorman reckons Sir was telling the truth. That there was a toxic combination of bad luck, bad decisions and moral cowardice, but there never was a conspiracy to throw Elizabeth Lim to the lions. We’re putting her up at a safe house in town. Dave wants to interview her again before he has another go at the Harbingers.’
‘Meadowvale has a safe house in Norbold?’ Ash sounded surprised.
Hazel nodded. ‘Well … kind of. It’s more of a safe flat, at the back of Derby Road. We don’t have the funds to staff it permanently, but she’ll be OK there for the moment.’
Ash remembered how long Meadowvale had been able to provide prot
ection when it had seemed that his sons were in danger. ‘It’s not a long-term solution. Dave needs to make arrests. One or both of the Harbingers, and whoever they’ve been using for muscle. Then Miss Lim can return to her own flat and go back to work. The longer that takes, the harder it will be to keep her safe.’
‘We will keep her safe,’ insisted Hazel. ‘We have to. Whatever it takes.’
‘Whatever?’
Hazel said nothing. After a moment Ash tilted the reading light for a better look at her. She avoided his gaze.
‘What are you not telling me?’ As soon as he’d said it, he knew. ‘Oh Hazel – you didn’t?’
She gave a negligent shrug. ‘She has the flat for a few days at least. But when Maybourne can’t provide full cover any longer, she’ll be better moving in with me. She can have Saturday’s room’ – her last lodger had left no more belongings than would fit in a cardboard box under the stairs – ‘and I’m still on holiday so I can be with her round the clock. They’ll do drive-bys, too – lots of them. She’ll be safe until Dave can wrap things up.’
Ash was appalled. ‘You are not trained in close protection!’
‘No, but I am a trained police officer, I’ll have the ARU on speed-dial, and an old lady with an arthritic knee could hobble from my house to Meadowvale in three minutes. I know, it’s not a perfect solution. But you said it: close protection is only ever a short-term option. I can keep her safe long enough for Dave to end the threat permanently.’
Ash’s voice rose enough to disturb his dog, who lifted her head to look at him. ‘You can’t fight off armed men, you can only get hurt trying. Three minutes is more than enough for a professional to break down your door, run upstairs, fire two shots into your bed and two shots into hers, and be on the motorway before the ARU reaches Railway Street. You’d never know what hit you.’
Hazel was not unimaginative. The picture he painted glimmered in her mind’s eye. But everything he’d said, she had already considered. She’d weighed the risks, to Lim and herself, and accepted them. She thought she could make a better job of protecting Lim, and Gorman could do a better job of stopping the Harbingers, than anyone else who was both willing and available. No one would look for Felicity Cho in Railway Street. She could be brought in the back way, under cover of darkness, and stay out of sight until Gorman could make his arrests. It wasn’t a perfect solution. She thought it was the best they could do.
‘Gabriel,’ she said quietly, ‘we owe it to her. The police. We let her down. We let her down when her parents were murdered, and we let her down again after Harbinger found her. You can blame ACC-Crime, you can blame the old boys’ culture at Division, you can blame poor information-sharing; you can blame anyone and everyone who had a duty to help her and didn’t. But what matters right now is that Elizabeth Lim has broken cover because we said we could look after her better than she can look after herself. So we have to. If that means having her as a house-guest until Dave brings the Harbingers to book, I’m good with that.’
‘If they find her, you standing in the way will not stop them.’
‘It won’t come to that. Even if the Harbingers somehow tracked Lim to my house, they aren’t stupid. They know we’re onto them. They know that if they move against her again, we’ll be round their place before the ink’s dry on the warrant. Whether it’s the old man or his daughter who’s keeping this vendetta alive, they don’t want to spend the rest of their days behind bars.’
Ash thought she was being naïve. ‘This is a small town. You can’t keep secrets for long. People notice things.’
Hazel lifted her head and pinned him with her gaze. ‘Nobody noticed you living above Laura Fry’s office when you were supposed to be dead. And you weren’t even careful. You wandered round the town at night, peering in at my windows to make sure I was looking after your dog!’
He had no answer to that: it was true. Anyway, no answer he made, no argument he advanced, would change her mind. She wanted to do it because she took a broad view of her duties as a police officer. Partly because of her pride in public service, but also because she got an adrenalin rush from taking a gamble and getting away with it.
This was something new, something that had happened in the last year. It had happened as a consequence of things that they had done and been through together.
When Ash first knew her, Constable Best was an essentially conventional girl learning the book by heart so she could go by it in all conceivable circumstances. But there are times when the book doesn’t work; or, if it works, times that there are quicker, surer or more satisfying means to an end. That was something she’d learned from Gabriel Ash. Not because he was a natural rebel, but because he’d been forced into situations where the book was no help – where risky options were the only options.
And the thing about taking risks is, if the gamble doesn’t work you don’t get a second chance; but if it does, there’s no going back. No one stops gambling because they’ve won. Ash had a great many regrets about his life, and this wasn’t the least of them: that he was responsible for the adrenalin junkie that his friend was fast becoming. He was afraid for her. Sooner or later, every gambler loses. The lucky ones only lose money. But Hazel was starting to gamble with her safety; and, like all gamblers, she was starting to enjoy the game.
Anxious as he was, Ash couldn’t think what he could do, what he could say, to change her mind. He could only hope that DI Gorman would make his arrests before Elizabeth Lim’s lease on the safe house expired.
NINETEEN
Dave Gorman was no happier about the arrangement than Ash was. He saw no likelihood of bringing charges before Hazel moved her new house-guest in at Railway Street. He had tried to argue against it but found himself outmanoeuvred. Before she put the plan to him, Hazel obtained approval from Superintendent Maybourne.
‘It’s only for a few days,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Until you can get the Harbingers locked up.’
‘Days?’ Gorman exploded. ‘How long have you been a police officer? Nothing happens in days. This could drag on for months.’
‘No, it really can’t,’ Hazel told him severely. ‘I don’t want a third career running a B&B. Plus, Saturday could come back at any time and want his room.’
Privately, Gorman didn’t expect any of them to see Saturday again. If it comforted her to think otherwise, she could – but that wouldn’t make the machinery of justice run any faster. Like the mills of God, the law grinds slowly but it grinds exceedingly fine. At least, he corrected himself, it grinds slowly.
But concern for both women put an edge on his hunger to see justice done. He wasn’t a religious man, but even if he had been, the urgency of the situation precluded taking Sunday as a day of rest. He lifted his phone to organise a formal interview with Jocelyn Harbinger, here at Meadowvale. Then he put it down again. Summoned to the police station, she would arrive with her solicitor, and the two of them would have spent the drive discussing exactly what she should and shouldn’t say in answer to his questions, and at what point they would challenge him to charge or release her. If he turned up on her doorstep, she might decline to speak to him without her solicitor present. But she might take the view that refusing to co-operate would only feed his suspicions.
He went alone – there was no longer any reason not to involve his team, only that he’d have to waste time explaining why he hadn’t involved them before – and he spent the twenty-minute journey planning the interview. In particular, he drummed it into his head that he must not – must not, under any circumstances – give away the fact that he knew where Elizabeth Lim was. That he’d spoken to her. That was all someone as smart as Jocelyn Harbinger would need. Someone with enough connections could find out about the flat behind Derby Road.
The housekeeper answered the door. ‘Detective Inspector Gorman,’ he said. ‘Mrs …?’
‘Fisher,’ she said stiffly. She was a woman in her fifties, wearing little or no make-up and the trademark black dress of her profession. D
ave Gorman was no expert on women’s fashions, but he recognised that particular severity of style that came with a price-tag attached. Of course, as a senior member of staff to a wealthy family, she probably earned more than he did. ‘You can’t see him.’
Gorman blinked. ‘Mr Harbinger? Why, what’s happened?’
‘He’s had a turn.’ There was a note of disfavour in her voice. ‘The doctor’s been. He says no one’s to be admitted – especially the police. He says it was your questions that brought it on. Raking everything up again.’
‘I’m sorry Mr Harbinger isn’t well,’ said the DI woodenly. ‘Is Miss Harbinger at home?’
‘She’s with him. I’m not disturbing them while she’s with him.’
Gorman made an effort to hang onto his patience. ‘Mrs Fisher, there’s no need for us to disturb Mr Harbinger. If you’ll ask Miss Harbinger to come downstairs, we can talk in the … in the …’ He looked round the hall in search of something he recognised.
Dave Gorman was born in a two-up, two-down identical to Hazel’s house in Railway Street, so his familiarity with the domestic arrangements of the super-rich was minimal. He seemed to remember that country houses had libraries. And possibly orangeries. But his nerve failed under the withering scorn of the housekeeper’s eye, and he simply picked a door and pointed. ‘In there.’
Mrs Fisher regarded him with ill-concealed triumph. ‘Miss Jocelyn Harbinger does not conduct interviews in the broom cupboard.’
Gorman was almost – almost – certain that the houses of the gentry, even those which had originally been built as farmhouses, did not have the broom cupboard opening off the central hall. Another moment under that brittle, hostile gaze and he’d have felt compelled to establish the fact, one way or the other; so it was with relief that he heard a step on the stairs, and looking up he saw Jocelyn Harbinger looking down at him over the baluster rail.
‘Mr Gorman? I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey. My father isn’t fit to answer any more questions.’
‘So Mrs Fisher was telling me,’ said Gorman. ‘I’m sorry he’s not well. Will he be all right?’