Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  Hazel almost managed indignation. “Of course we should be looking for him! However hard it’s going to be, we can’t just abandon him. These people are killing him—murdering him. The fact that they’re using his own hand to do it doesn’t alter that!”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said the DI quickly. “What I mean is, Ash is going to need help. To make sure his family is safe before he does anything … irreversible. Someone to meet them and let him know they’re okay. That person may be easier to find. Who would he ask? To do something that difficult, that dangerous, that emotionally demanding. Who would he turn to?”

  There was no stopping the tears now. It was the final straw, the ultimate betrayal of their friendship. Hazel felt as if the last thing Gabriel Ash had done before organizing his public suicide was slap her face. “Me,” she sobbed. “I didn’t know there was anyone else.”

  Gorman brought her coffee in a horrible little waxed-paper cup. She used the time it took to drink it to pack her emotions back in the box and hammer the lid down.

  Finally, when her composure was more or less restored, the DI said, “Hazel, you know we’ll do everything we can. But if we aren’t successful, promise me faithfully that you won’t blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”

  And perhaps it wasn’t. But she was a compassionate young woman, and if she couldn’t save Ash, if this happened despite her best efforts, she would feel all her life that she’d let him down.

  “And the other thing we might want to consider,” murmured Gorman, “is that maybe Ash is right and we’re wrong.”

  Hazel didn’t understand. She frowned at him, perplexed, so that he had to grit his teeth and say aloud what he’d hoped she might recognize intuitively.

  “I mean, maybe a man has the right to make a sacrifice—even this sacrifice—for the sake of his family.”

  Hazel stared at him in astonishment. “Kill himself? In front of the world’s online community? To protect a bunch of murderous pirates? Are you insane?”

  But he wasn’t ready to back down. “Give it some thought. Would you stop him from diving into a river to save them if their car went off a bridge?”

  “It’s different,” she insisted. “To risk your life is one thing. To throw it away is another.”

  “He’s prepared to sacrifice himself for his wife and children. Lots of people would see that as a pretty noble thing.”

  “It is noble,” Hazel conceded. “Being willing to do it is noble. It wouldn’t be very noble of us to let him.”

  “Would he forgive us if we stopped him?”

  “Probably not. Who cares?”

  “Would he forgive you?”

  That made her pause. But it didn’t make her change her mind. “I don’t imagine he would. Too bad. This is too important to go along with what somebody else thinks is right, even if it’s Gabriel. I think he’s too distraught to be making life-and-death decisions, and if I can stop him making this one, I will. If we can stop him, we must.”

  It was hard to tell what Gorman thought. Perhaps he wasn’t allowing himself the luxury of an opinion. To a great extent, his duty was clear whatever he thought. Suicide isn’t a crime in Britain, but assisting one is. If he could save Ash from his own best intentions, he was bound to try.

  Hazel’s brow was creasing again with thought. Suddenly it cleared. She knew, as surely as if she’d overheard the conversation, to whom he would have turned in preference to Hazel herself. And Stephen Graves would have agreed because, his own involvement’s being so problematic already, the last thing he wanted was Ash angry enough to go to the police.

  “Find Stephen Graves,” she said breathlessly. “If Gabriel needs someone to fly out and negotiate Cathy’s freedom for him, at least he won’t have to explain it all to Graves. At least Graves won’t try to stop him.”

  * * *

  That night, when she was alone, she watched the thing again. Patience, curled up on her sofa, seemed not to recognize the image on the screen and paid it no heed. Hazel envied the dog her blissful ignorance.

  Hazel was an optimist at heart. She always looked for silver linings, always believed that there would be one even if it took a bit of finding. Driving home—Dave Gorman had offered to have someone take her, but she didn’t want company and most of all she didn’t want the company of police officers—she’d almost managed to persuade herself it was a trick. Norbold in general and Meadowvale in particular knew Gabriel Ash as an idiot. They called him “Rambles With Dogs.” Hazel knew a very different Ash, a man with a highly intelligent and analytical mind damaged by the events that had overtaken him. She had to trust that he was still capable of putting together a package that would give him what he wanted—the return of his wife and sons—without giving the kidnappers what they wanted. She had herself more than half convinced that when she watched the video again, that was what she would see: a clever man outsmarting his tormentors.

  And it wasn’t. Try as she might, hard as she looked, Hazel could see only what everyone else had seen: an exhausted man driven to despair, offering up his own life for the safety of his family. His deep eyes were drained, no hope left, and over the broad bones his face was drawn gaunt, dark shadows gathered in the hollows of his cheeks.

  Despair. Not desperation, which at least allows the possibility that a situation may still be salvaged and hunts frantically for the hidden way. Despair is not frantic but chill, the slow cooling that follows the death of all hope. Despair knows there is no happy ending. Nothing left to chase, nothing to strive for. That was how Gabriel Ash looked now, staring out of the screen at her like a stranger. Like a dead man captured forever in the moments before his death. The vacant-eyed Tommy photographed in the muddy trench in Flanders, repairing his kit while even now another soldier of the Great War is loading the shell that will kill him.

  Sobs juddered in her throat. She twisted her hands in the hem of her shirt, wringing it beyond rescue. Grief tore her insides. He was her friend, and she was about to lose him, and he was alone. If he’d been where she could reach out to him, nothing would have stopped her. Certainly not the fact that he was somebody else’s husband. She wasn’t in love with Gabriel Ash. That had never been an issue. But, however much he exasperated her, she had come to love him, in a way. To care for him, to worry about him, to hope things would work out for him.

  But they weren’t going to, and he knew it and now she knew it, too. And she wanted to be with him. To stop him, if she could; to plead with him that the sacrifice was too great, whatever the prize; to insist that there was another way, had to be, and beg him to look for it; to cut the plug off his computer and the jack off the phone line so the essential element of proof that the pirates were looking for couldn’t be provided, at least until he got to a hardware shop. And if all that failed—and Hazel knew in her heart that it would fail, that the most she could do now was delay him—to be with him at the end. His witness, his comfort, his friend.

  But she wasn’t with him; he’d made sure of that. He hadn’t wanted to listen to her arguments or her pleas, and he hadn’t wanted her to witness what he was going to do. That was why he had left Norbold and not told her where he was going.

  She sat up most of the night, miserable, lonely, and afraid, waiting for news that never came. Around dawn, exhausted, still in her chair—and yesterday’s clothes—she fell into a troubled sleep. The phone woke her; she started violently enough to bruise her insides. It was DI Gorman.

  “Stephen Graves has left the country. He was on a flight from Heathrow to Addis Ababa yesterday afternoon. Just him. Neither his wife nor his secretary knew he was going.”

  “He’s gone to bring her home,” Hazel said faintly. “After…” She swallowed. “After Gabriel is dead.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” agreed Gorman, his tone somber. “The pirates take Graves to Cathy, he calls Ash to say she’s fit and well and ready to leave, and Ash carries out his side of the bargain.”

  “At which point the pirates slit
Cathy’s throat and Graves’s as well,” said Hazel. Her voice was thick as wormwood in her throat.

  “It’s possible. Though actually, it wouldn’t gain them anything. With Ash dead, they might as well let them go. If only in the interests of future negotiations.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought that the business of piracy would go on after her own involvement had ended. That other hostages would be taken, if they weren’t already being held in reserve, and their desperate relatives made to dance to the pirates’ tune. There seemed to be no way of stopping it, not even with innocent blood.

  “This isn’t why I called,” said Gorman. “Has Ash ever mentioned a café called the Copper Kettle to you?”

  The sheer unexpectedness of it made Hazel bark an incredulous laugh. “You think he’s negotiating his life away over coffee and scones in a tearoom?”

  “No, I don’t,” said the DI levelly. “The café closed a year ago. But the building was owned by Ash’s mother—the team searching his house found the deeds in a bureau. The last tenancy agreement lapsed, so the building is probably empty. Not a bad option if you need to be undisturbed for a couple of days.”

  Hazel felt her heart quicken. “This building—is it in Norbold?”

  “Leamington Spa.”

  “Give me the address. I’ll meet you there in”—she did a quick calculation—“twenty minutes.”

  “Not legally you won’t!”

  “Dave, Gabriel Ash’s life depends on it. We’re not even talking about speed limits.”

  And of course he did as requested. If she hadn’t asked him to meet her in Leamington Spa, he’d have asked her. He wanted her there if they found Ash locked up in his mother’s little investment property with a computer and a double-barreled shotgun. Gorman didn’t expect the man to put the gun down and come quietly because he asked. He just might do if Hazel Best asked.

  Back in Balfour Street, Hazel was heading for the door, taking the car keys off the dresser as she went. The white dog stood in her way, gazing at her hopefully.

  Hazel shook her head impatiently. “No, we can’t go down the towpath, there isn’t time.” The scimitar tail waved. “No, you can’t come with me. I don’t know how long I’ll be.” But actually, that was a pretty good reason not to leave even a well-behaved dog alone in Mrs. Poliakov’s house.

  Hazel took a steadying breath. “And I don’t know what I’m going to find.”

  Patience kept on regarding her with those calm toffee-colored eyes.

  There also wasn’t time for an argument. “Oh, all right, then,” Hazel growled, and the lurcher led the way out to the car.

  CHAPTER 11

  STEPHEN GRAVES HAD LEFT THE COUNTRY eighteen hours earlier, openly on his own passport, flying from London to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, three hundred miles from the Somali border. Of course, three hundred miles in Africa is not like three hundred miles in England. It was probably as close as he could land to Somalia without risking the same fate as Cathy Ash.

  As she drove, Hazel tried to make sense of everything that had happened. Gabriel Ash had sworn to kill himself, live—she wished she could think of a better word—on the Internet, where the pirates could watch, as the price of freedom for his wife and sons. But he wasn’t going to do it until he knew they were safe. Stephen Graves, who’d been the pawn of the same pirates, had left for the Horn of Africa. Internal flights and a hired Land Rover would take him from Addis to any of a hundred points along the Somali border where an exchange could take place.

  What then? He’d speak to Ash, by phone or video call. “They’re here. I can see them. They seem fine. There are three machine guns aimed at them. There are two half-tracks and a helicopter, and maybe fifteen men. They have a laptop in one of the half-tracks, picking up your feed. What do you want me to do?”

  And Ash would say, “Exactly what I told you to do before you left. Ask to speak to Cathy. Have them bring her within earshot. Ask her if she’s all right. Ask if the boys are all right. Ask her if she’s been told they’re being freed.”

  A pause. Then: “She says they are, and that’s what the kidnappers told her. She wants to know why. Should I tell her?”

  “On no account.” Hazel could almost hear the steel in Ash’s voice. “She’ll find out soon enough. Keep her away from the Internet for as long as you can.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “Ask them to release Cathy to you as a show of goodwill. Point out that she was separated from her sons for four years, she’s not going to leave them behind now.”

  Then: “Cathy’s with me. They still have the boys on the other side of the checkpoint. We’re all within machine-gun range. They say no more concessions until they’ve got what they came for. They say it’s time to do what you promised.”

  “I know.”

  And then—what? What did Ash intend? A bullet in the brain, a knife across his throat? It had to be something pretty unarguable. He couldn’t take an aspirin, tell them it was strychnine, fall over, and expect to be believed. In exactly the same way that Ash wanted proof that his family was alive, the pirates would want proof that Ash was dead.

  And then a good man, a loving husband and father, would do what good men have been prepared to do since humanity was in its infancy: render up his own life for the sake of his family. Men hunting dangerous beasts, men fishing wild seas, men mining the depths of the unkindly earth—all those men who risked death, and accepted it when it came, to put food on their children’s table and coals in their hearth. There was nothing unique about what Gabriel Ash was doing. The only thing that would set his death apart from all those that had gone before was the thousands, potentially millions, of people who would witness it.

  And when was this meant to happen? The answer came from the marrow of Hazel’s bones: sooner rather than later. The more time that passed, the greater the chance of Ash’s being found and stopped; and he didn’t want that, and the pirates didn’t want that. The clock had started ticking as soon as that video went viral. In a very real sense, the eyes of the world were watching to see what Gabriel Ash would do next. Hazel didn’t need to watch; she knew. He’d do what he’d said he’d do, unless she reached him first.

  * * *

  There was no motorway between Norbold and Leamington Spa. The most direct route was the A road, and it passed through a number of villages and around a couple of larger towns.

  Hazel first saw them as she drove through Upper Lytton. And thought nothing of it, except that the July sales must have started. But it was the same in Beeswick and on the Ashbury bypass: clusters of people standing on the pavements, staring into shop windows. Not going into the shops, just staring through the windows. When she realized they were all electrical shops—shops with computers and tablets in their windows—she knew what they were looking at.

  Her heart leaden within her, she looked for somewhere to stop, hurrying to join the little group outside Bright Spark Electricals on the Ashbury bypass. People at the back of the gathering shuffled aside to make room for her. She was struck by the awful silence.

  If she hadn’t already known what she was going to see, Hazel wouldn’t have recognized Gabriel Ash. The strain had sapped every ounce of color from his face, and he sat in front of the computer as rigid as an artist’s model. Only his lips moved when he spoke, and the top of his chest, visible in his open-necked shirt, rose and fell with his shallow, rapid breathing. He looked—the thought drove knives into her—frightened to death. And also utterly determined.

  There was a young couple standing beside Hazel. The girl said, “I think he’s going to do it.” And the young man said, almost breezily, “No, it’s a scam. There’s money involved somewhere, bet you anything.”

  Hazel found herself spinning on them, ready to vent her misery and frustration. But then she saw that the girl was crying. There were slow tears wandering down her cheeks. And the young man, a protective arm around her, was saying anything he could to comfort her. He didn’t think it
was a scam. He wanted her to leave before the inevitable happened. But she wouldn’t be drawn away. She seemed to feel she owed it to the broken stranger not to turn away.

  A sense of obligation the rest of the quiet little gathering seemed to share. When the manager of Bright Spark Electricals realized what was going on, he hurried to the window display and started turning off the monitors. But the watchers insisted, quietly but resolutely, that he turn them back on. Not because they wanted to watch, but because they felt they should.

  Hazel tried to look past Ash’s gaunt face to the room behind him. Did it look like an abandoned café? There was nothing to see, only white walls with nothing on them. He could have been, almost literally, anywhere on the globe.

  A phone rang, sending a shock wave rippling through the little crowd outside the electrical supplier’s. They had been wound taut waiting, and they hadn’t been waiting for this, and the faint anticlimax drew sighs of relief and even a few wry chuckles.

  Then they realized that the phone didn’t belong to any of them, but to the man on the screen, the ring reaching them through the plate-glass window. The chastened manager had turned the sound up, almost as a public service for those who didn’t have the equipment to follow these unfolding events. A detached part of Hazel’s brain that was still capable of rational analysis supposed it was the same at all the electrical shops where the little crowds had gathered. Many more people—ordinary people, not natural ghouls—would be following the drama on computers, laptops, and smartphones in homes and offices up and down the country, and farther afield.

  The phone was on the desk beside Ash’s computer; in answering it, he brought it into the Webcam’s field of view. The sound of his voice had more trouble penetrating the plate glass than the ring of the phone had, but in fact the sound was almost superfluous. Anyone could have read his lips for the few words he spoke, and those who couldn’t could have read his eyes.

  He said, “Yes?” And then, with a different inflection, “Yes.” A much longer pause while he listened.