by Jo Bannister
It would be different if he’d had any realistic chance of success. But his wife was the prisoner of terrorists in a lawless state that was geographically and culturally remote. The video link was misleading: it gave the impression that the person you were talking to was accessible. But today, with much of the world within the orbit of one satellite or another, being able to see and speak to someone didn’t mean you could reach them. If Cathy Ash’s captors were routing their transmissions so as to mask their whereabouts, Hazel couldn’t find them, and she knew a great deal more about information technology than Ash did. And if he couldn’t find Cathy, he couldn’t help her.
It was a cruel joke that was being played on him. Like dangling a toy just beyond a baby’s grasp, or showing a dog a biscuit and then eating it yourself. He would do what they said, whatever the cost to himself, but they wouldn’t keep their end of the bargain. They would keep his wife after they’d promised to return her. Or they would kill her because he hadn’t done everything they’d wanted, or hadn’t done it quickly enough. Or simply because they were finished with him, and it amused them. The bitter truth was that Cathy Ash would have been better off if she’d died four years ago. She was never coming home.
If Ash had asked Hazel what she honestly thought, she’d have told him. She’d have sat with him while he dealt with it; and maybe it would have taken all the strength he had left, but in the end whatever survived would be standing on rock, not quicksand. After the grieving was done he could think about moving forward.
But he hadn’t asked her. He hadn’t wanted to know what she thought. If she’d tried to tell him anyway, he’d have refused to listen. That was why he didn’t want her around anymore: he didn’t want to hear that all he could do was make things worse. He was sticking his fingers in his ears like a frightened child.
There’s only one way to help a frightened child: hold it until the monsters go away. But Ash didn’t want holding, at least not by her.
Thinking thus brought a bitter taste to Hazel’s mouth, not because she thought Ash was behaving badly but because she suspected she was. She was angry with him, and that wasn’t reasonable. Three months ago the man had barely functioned as a human being, torn to shreds by his warring emotions. Now he found himself in a situation that would have challenged someone with no emotions. And she had the gall to resent the fact that some of his decisions were not the ones she would have made for him?
“Grow up, Hazel Best,” she growled at herself, climbing the stairs to her rooms at the top of Mrs. Poliakov’s Villa Biala in Balfour Street.
With her key in the door, she froze. It felt wrong. The lock turned, but reluctantly, as if something had happened to it while she’d been out. Something, possibly, involving little bits of bent metal and 22-’loid credit cards.
She knew what she should do next. She knew what the sensible response was, and whatever her strengths and failings, she had always been irredeemably sensible. She should have backed quietly away and called Meadowvale from the bottom of the stairs.
Instead she threw the door wide, hard enough to stun anyone standing behind it, and strode quickly inside.
You have to say something when you might be surprising a burglar. She went with “All right, who’s playing silly buggers?”
But there was no answer, and when she’d had time to take in her surroundings, for a moment Hazel felt rather foolish. There were no upended drawers in the middle of the floor, no drifts of books scattered across the rug. Crossing the sitting room to the bedroom beyond, she found no piles of clothes on the bed. There was no sign of any disturbance at all.
She paused to catch her breath and take stock. At a much calmer pace she walked around the entire flatlet—two rooms and a tiny bathroom—and checked everywhere that anyone could possibly be hiding, after which she was content that she had the place to herself. And everything looked just as it had when she went out.
It would have been easy to think she must have been mistaken. But Hazel knew what she’d felt when she put the key in the lock, and she knew where she’d felt that before—in basic training, when her tutors were preparing her for the various situations she’d be dealing with. She had no doubt that the lock had been tampered with, and it followed that someone had been in her rooms while she was out. Not Mrs. Poliakov, who had her own key, but someone with the knowledge and the tools to force an entry, and the skill and also the motive to conduct a search without leaving any sign of it. Upending drawers is the work of seconds. A search that is both thorough and undetectable takes much longer.
But she’d been out for only some fifty minutes. So he’d known exactly what he was looking for and hadn’t bothered looking in places it couldn’t be. It was no leap of intuition to get from there to the laptop Saturday had left with her.
But there were problems with that, and they presented themselves one after another when she sat down on the little two-seater sofa, its many cushions still arranged as she’d left them, and thought it through. She didn’t have the laptop anymore. Until she handed it over to DI Gorman, only Saturday had known she’d ever had it. By the time Gorman could have mentioned it to anyone, it was no longer in her possession, so there would have been no point for anyone to break into her flat to look for it.
Besides, who would Gorman have mentioned it to? Someone at the council, to get a number for the developer working on the Dirty Nellie’s plans. But would he have mentioned Hazel’s involvement even in passing? Some clerk would look up a file, Gorman would phone the number, and he’d get … another clerk, probably. So he’d leave a message: a laptop handed in as lost and found, some plans on it, anybody missing one? Before long the message would reach the owner, who would call back and claim it.
And say … and say … and say, perhaps, that he’d like to send some flowers as a thank-you; who was it who found it?
Strictly speaking, DI Gorman shouldn’t have given either her name or her address. But he knew her, and maybe that altered things. Maybe he thought she’d appreciate a bunch of flowers. Maybe he couldn’t see what harm it would do.
That should have been the end of the matter. The fact that it wasn’t, that instead of sending flowers, someone had broken into her flat, could have meant any number of things, but what it meant for certain was that this was no longer a simple case of restoring lost property to its rightful owner. Someone was behaving as if he had something to hide.
Hazel spent a little more time going through the evidence before her, to make sure she wasn’t overreacting. Then she picked up the phone to call DI Gorman.
Then she put it down again. The only one she’d spoken to about this was Dave Gorman. And after she’d spoken to him, someone had come and given her flat a thoroughly professional search. Did she really want Gorman to know that she’d noticed?
The answers to two questions would tell her a lot more about what was going on, and would mean she could judge the honesty of the answers she was given to any other questions she asked. The Town Hall could give her the first piece of information. And just thinking about it carefully enough would give her the second.
She phoned the Town Hall, asked for the Planning Department. “The developer on the Dirty Nellie’s proposal—can I have the name and address?”
The planning officer was a bit sniffy, though not about giving out the information, which was a matter of public record. “We’re not calling it Dirty Nellie’s anymore. We’re calling it the Archway.”
“Of course we are,” said Hazel encouragingly. The developers were Fenimore & Newman, with an address in Birmingham. “And was it Mr. Fenimore or Mr. Newman who was in Norbold last week?”
“Neither. It was their structural engineer, Mr. Charles Armitage.”
Googling him didn’t tell her very much more. He was a man in his late forties, married, with three children, who lived in the Clent Hills and had worked for Fenimore & Newman for eleven years. Nothing about his photograph suggested he was a man who’d break into other people’s flats.
&nbs
p; But if he had, or if someone had on his behalf, what had he been looking for? He’d already got his laptop back, or at least he’d been told it had been found and was waiting for him. He knew before someone took lockpicks to Hazel’s door that she no longer had his computer.
So he wanted to know—she was working this out as she went along—if she’d had a look at the contents before she handed it in. With a password like PASSWORD, it was entirely possible. And the way he’d know that, without asking her, was … yes. If she’d seen something he didn’t want her to see, she’d have made a copy. He, or someone working for him, broke into her flat, looking for memory sticks.
Hazel went quickly to her own computer, opened the drawer where she kept her peripherals. It looked undisturbed, but then, so had the flat. Had someone copied them? It would have been the work of moments if he’d come prepared. But he wouldn’t have found what he was looking for, only photos of family and friends and copies of work-related documents she might conceivably need again.
The next question was, would that have reassured him, or the very opposite? Would he have waded through the pictures of her father digging his garden, Pete Byrfield driving his cows, and Patience posing smugly against a variety of backdrops—she had no images of Ash, who hated being photographed—and read her essays on the future of community policing in twenty-first-century Britain, then celebrated with a stiff drink the fact that nobody so boring could represent any kind of a threat? Or would he have been concerned that finding nothing didn’t mean there was nothing to find; rather, that she’d been clever enough to hide it where he wouldn’t look?
“Mr. Armitage, Mr. Armitage”—she sighed, gazing at his photograph on her laptop screen—“what is it you’re not telling me? You mislaid your laptop, you got it back within a few days, and still you were worried enough to turn burglar. Why? Besides all those plans and drawings and things, what the hell else did you have on that computer?”
CHAPTER 7
“THEY WANT TO TALK TO YOU.” There was an audible shake in Stephen Graves’s voice.
“When?”
“Now. Tonight.” In fact, it was already Wednesday morning, if only just.
“Where?”
“The Cambridge flat.”
“You’ll meet me there?”
“Yes.” Even to himself, Graves’s voice must have sounded hesitant, because he repeated the word with added certainty. “Yes.”
“I’ll leave now. But it’ll take me a couple of hours to get there.”
“There’s time. Just.”
Ash looked at his watch. For a long time after leaving his job, he hadn’t bothered wearing one. Time hadn’t had much meaning for him. Only days ago he’d felt the need to reintegrate himself into the temporal continuum that ruled most people’s days and used to govern his. He’d gone to the chest of drawers in his bedroom, straight to the watch his wife had given him. He hadn’t looked at it for years, but he knew exactly where it was. Now it was on his wrist.
“All right,” he said.
The dog watched expectantly as he dressed. He avoided meeting her gaze. “I can’t take you. I don’t know how long I’ll be. I don’t know if I’ll be coming straight back.”
Patience said nothing, just held him in her steady golden gaze.
“I’ll leave the back door open.” There was little in his house that was worth stealing. “If I’m not going to be back by morning, I’ll ask Hazel to come around and feed you.…”
That pulled him up short, like dropping a mental anchor. He couldn’t call Hazel. He’d told her he didn’t want her help. If he called now, to ask her to look after Patience, she’d think him a hypocrite for using her when it suited him, excluding her when it didn’t. She’d say that he presumed on a friendship that he only ever acknowledged on his own terms.
And then she’d come around and look after Patience.
Knowing that didn’t make him feel much better as he let himself out of the house, pausing only to check that he had his phone.
* * *
He didn’t even have the courage to speak to her. Eight o’clock that morning found Hazel sitting on her bed, fuming, with the text on her knee. After all they’d been through together. After everything she’d forgiven him for—and everything, to be fair, he’d forgiven her. And now he couldn’t pick up the phone and say, “Look, when I said I didn’t need any more help, I may have been a bit premature.”
Instead he sent her a text. “Can you feed Patience? Possibly next few days. Will let you know. Back door open. Thanks.” And he signed it Ash. That was all. No apology, no explanation, just a blithe assumption that she’d fit in with his plans.
Furious as she was, Hazel almost texted back immediately: “Busy—get someone else.” But there was no one else, unless you counted Laura Fry and the perennially unreliable Saturday. If she refused, probably Patience would go hungry.
Scowling, Hazel put her shoes on and went downstairs and out to her car. But she was damned if she was going to call Ash to confirm that she was prepared to tidy up his loose ends once again.
Childishness is a contagious disease.
* * *
Hazel looked at the dog, and the dog looked at Hazel. Hazel blinked first. “Well, you’ve had your breakfast and you’ve been out. You’ve got water, and you’ve got your basket, and, God help me, I’ve even plumped up the cushions on the sofa, which, if you were my dog, I wouldn’t let you sit on. What else can you possibly want?”
Patience didn’t answer. But she did continue looking at Hazel in the expectant way that a dog has when it knows that if it can be patient enough for long enough, its human will finally understand.
Hazel’s forehead wrinkled in a doubtful frown. “You want to come with me?”
A wave of the scimitar tail suggested she was getting warmer.
“You want to come home with me?”
Dogs don’t nod. A flicker in the steady golden gaze suggested a nod.
“You can’t,” Hazel said firmly. “Whatever would my landlady say? Anyway, Gabriel will be back soon enough. He’ll throw a wobbly if he gets in and you’re not here.”
The lurcher wasn’t giving up. There was nothing remotely aggressive about her stance or even her persistence, but she had the air of someone who would stand on the bridge as long as it took for the bodies of all her enemies to float underneath.
“No,” said Hazel firmly. “I’ll come back, I’ll keep checking on you till he gets home, but you have to stay here. I can’t do what I have to do with a damn great dog in tow!”
Ten minutes later they were driving back through Norbold, Patience on the backseat like the queen on a state visit, Hazel working out how she could do what she had to do with a damn great dog in tow.
* * *
She could have called Charles Armitage to ask if he’d sent someone to search her flat and, if so, what it was he’d hoped to find. But Hazel had learned her trade from some good teachers, men and women who’d policed Britain at a time when information technology was the landline telephone, the lapel radio, and a copy of the local A to Z; who hadn’t grown up thinking that the answers to most questions should be no more than a couple of clicks away; and who therefore knew the art of discovering information for themselves, often from people who didn’t want to part with it.
And one of the best bits of advice she’d been given had been: Try not to ask a question until you have at least some idea what the answer should be. Then you’ll know if you’re being told porkies, and who’s worried enough to be telling them.
Or she could have swallowed her misgivings and gone to DI Gorman. Until she’d got home and found her key catching in her door, she’d never had reason to doubt his integrity, even at a time when the rest of Meadowvale was treating her as a pariah. The fact remained, the only connection between Hazel and the owner of the laptop was Dave Gorman.
Plus, of course, all the paperwork that attended even something as simple as restoring a bit of lost property to a careless visitor. Once G
orman had recorded who’d handed the machine in, almost anyone in the police station could have accessed the information. Still, she was reluctant to pour anything more into a bucket she thought might be leaking.
There was one thing she’d noticed that might lead her somewhere: the remarkable tidiness of her flat after the search. That wasn’t a couple of local hoodlums hired for twenty quid apiece; that was a professional job.
The British police have an odd relationship with private investigators. Officially they’re dismissive, on the grounds that anything that needs investigating is the preserve of the police and paying a private investigator to investigate anything else is like pushing money down a manhole. Unofficially, though, there is often a kind of guarded respect between them, not least because many private investigators are retired police officers.
A retired police officer would know how a search should be conducted, and would have the time to do it properly.
Hazel presented herself at the front desk just as Sergeant Murchison was coming on duty. She thought she saw him wince, but she might have been mistaken. For one thing, he owed her. Until she worked out how the recent death in custody had come about, much of the responsibility had hovered over Donald Murchison’s shoulders. One day he would be grateful to her.
Perhaps it was a little soon for gratitude. But as long as she stayed this side of the counter, she was a member of the public and he was there to serve her. Worse, she was a member of the public who knew he was there to serve her.
“Hazel,” he acknowledged cautiously. “How can I help you?”
“I need the name of a reliable private investigator. Ex-job. Discretion and professionalism more important than cost. Anyone come to mind?”
If a genuine member of the public had asked him that, Murchison would have referred her to the Yellow Pages rather than make a recommendation. But Hazel Best was still, more or less, a colleague. He’d need a reason not to help her out, and he couldn’t think of one quickly enough. “What’s it to do with?”